


Falling Slowly

by trixietru



Series: Falling Slowly [1]
Category: Psych
Genre: Angst, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 20:10:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trixietru/pseuds/trixietru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place after the events of the S6 finale "SantaBarbaraTown". After a tragedy, Shawn leaves town and Lassiter comes to some uncomfortable realizations. Spoilers for all six seasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova song “Falling Slowly” from the movie (and now Broadway play) _Once_. There are at least fifteen other stories on the AO3 with the same title all inspired by the same song, but none of them are in the Psych fandom, so I’m pretending that they don’t exist!

_And games that never amount_  
To more than they’re meant  
Will play themselves out.  
\- Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova 

 

Right after the funeral, Shawn leaves. 

Lassiter doesn’t realize it at first. He had seen Shawn after the ceremony with Madeline, but lost track of him after reaching Henry Spencer’s house for the wake. He’s not with O’Hara, who seems more fragile than he thought she would be and who is also being unexpectedly tight-lipped, or with Madeline, who he can see talking with Guster’s mother. Lassiter starts looking for Shawn so that he can give his condolences and leave; there’s still paperwork to finish pertaining to Henry’s murder and Jerry Carp’s arrest, and he wants to make sure that everything is handled to the letter, nothing for a pesky lawyer to unravel in court. 

But Shawn isn’t on the porch or in the kitchen or living room with other mourners, and Lassiter finds himself going up the stairs to Shawn’s childhood bedroom, feeling torn between wanting to let the other man grieve in private and wanting to make sure he’s okay. It’s Guster he finds in the bedroom, though, looking at a wall of framed pictures of himself and Shawn as kids. Gus looks up as he comes into the room, offers up a weak half-smile, then looks back down at the picture he’s pulled off the wall. 

“I was just remembering how Mr. Spencer used to take Shawn and me trick or treating, but wouldn’t let us eat any of the candy until after he had taken it all down to the station to be x-rayed. I’m pretty sure he ate all of our Reeses.”

In the picture, mini-Shawn and mini-Gus are dressed as a police officer and Lando Calrissian respectively, both of them grinning broadly. It’s so unbearably adorable that Lassiter has to look away after a moment. 

“Shawn really wanted to dress up as Han Solo that year, but Mr. Spencer…he always wanted so much for Shawn to be a cop, and Shawn didn’t want to disappoint him”. 

Lassiter understands that “then” is the unspoken word at the end of the sentence, that eight-year-old Shawn might not have wanted to disappoint his father, but that over the next twenty years he would take it on as a sort of competitive sport, always trying to top himself. 

“Where is Sp- Shawn?” he asks, feeling awkward.

Guster doesn’t seem to notice. “He’s gone,” he says shortly, replacing the picture and wandering over to look out the window. 

Lassiter frowns. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“I mean gone. He left town. I don’t know where he’s headed; I don’t think he knows himself. “  
“But…” Lassiter feels a little sick at the realization of what Gus is saying “When’s he coming back?” 

“He’s not” Gus replies, then amends “Well, he’s not coming back any time soon, I don’t think. I know…” Gus falters, then rallies “I know he’ll be back to visit, at least.”

Lassiter sits down on the edge of the bed to absorb this news, feeling more shocked than he ever thought he might at this announcement. “But what about O’Hara?” he asks, and he almost doesn’t recognize the bewildered voice as his own. 

Guster turns to look at him now, his arms crossed across his chest. “They broke up last night.” 

“WHAT?” A tiny, faraway part of Lassiter’s mind tells him that he must sound ridiculous, but he doesn’t think he could be more stunned if Guster had turned around and sucker-punched him. “Why would they break up the night before his father’s funeral?”

Guster looks distinctly uncomfortable now. “Look, it’s not my place to say. You’ll have to ask Juliet about what happened. You _should_ ask her. I know she could use a friend right now.”

“What about Psych? What will you do?”

“As of today, Psych is out of business. There are only a couple of months left on the lease. I’ll pay it off and close the office."

Guster had been doing well up until now, but at this declaration he sounds like he might cry. Lassiter can’t blame him; he feels a little like crying himself, which is the opposite of any reaction he ever thought he would have to the news that the absurd psychic detective agency was finally out of his life. 

“Jesus,” he breathes out slowly, absorbing the shock. He looks up at the other man, who in one fell swoop has just lost his best friend, his business, and a father figure that he’s known all his life. “I’m sorry.”

Gus shrugs, tries for casual and doesn’t quite pull it off. “I’ve always known Shawn might leave.

I got comfortable after a couple of years, thinking he was here for good, but this is the way he’s always been. I guess I’m just surprised it took this long, but I’m not surprised that it happened now. He’s mad at Henry for not realizing that his friends were crooks, and he’ll never forgive himself for not figuring it out fast enough to save his dad. Shawn is…he doesn’t know how to deal with all the anger he’s feeling right now. Leaving is how he copes. “  
Lassiter looks down, unsure of how to respond to this. Gus shakes himself, seems to pull himself together. 

“I should go downstairs and check on the food, make sure everyone’s okay. I’ve been up here too long.”

Lassiter stands, hesitates a moment before speaking, because he almost can’t believe he’s saying this, but at the same time it feels like the right thing to do. 

“You should be proud, you know. You and Shawn did a lot of good work. I mean, it was all completely ridiculous,” he scowls, so Guster will know he’s serious, “and I thought about arresting you both myself dozens of times, but you did assist in putting a lot of criminals behind bars. You should be proud of that.” 

He hesitates again, and then sticks his hand out. Gus looks at it for a moment like he’s not sure what to do, then slowly reaches out to shake it.

“Thank you, Detective Lassiter,” he says. “It’s…it’s been a real honor.” And then he’s gone, out of the room and down the stairs, to be Shawn’s proxy in taking care of the responsibilities that Shawn has left behind. 

Lassiter spends the rest of the afternoon at the police station, which is running on a minimal staff due to Henry’s funeral. He’s just finished catching up on typing up reports when he remembers that he had turned his phone off that morning before the service began. Turning it on now, he sees he has one voicemail from Spencer. For some reason that he doesn’t want to examine too closely seeing that he has a message from Shawn makes his heart stop for a minute. He gets up and leaves the noisy bullpen area of the station, rationalizing to himself that he needs a quieter spot in order to properly listen to the message, and finds himself in a file room empty of other personnel. When he plays the message, the first thing he’s struck by is the tension in Spencer’s voice. 

“Hey, Lassie. By the time you listen to this, you’ll probably already know that I’m giving up the psychic biz and leaving town. Congratulations, I’m finally out of your hair! Try to wait at least 24 hours before throwing the celebratory party. Um, anyway, I just wanted to ask you to look after Jules for a little while. I mean, you and I both know she can take care of herself and kick both our asses, but …” and here, Shawn’s voice catches, almost like he’s holding back tears “I really fucked up with her, Lassie. You were right – I know you love it when I say that – to not want her involved with me. Anyway. Just remind her that I’m not worth brooding over, okay? I know I can count on you for that. And Lassie?” The next bit is said quickly, like Shawn was embarrassed to be saying it “I’m really going to miss you. You’re a great cop, just trust your instincts, and be careful. I’ll never forgive you if you get shot. Later, man.”

Lassiter winces at the reference to being shot, thinking of Henry, and saves the message so he can listen to it again when he’s home and has time to think about things. 

O’Hara is back at work the next day. There are circles under her eyes the likes of which Lassiter has never seen before, not even in the days after Yin dangled her off the top of the clock tower. 

He gives her his customary gruff “Good morning” to which she responds with a nod, and after that he’s not sure how to proceed. He tries to engage her in conversation about a couple of the cases they’re working on, but she only responds in monosyllables and barely seems to be listening. This much silence from his usually vivacious partner is unnerving. After two awkward hours, Lassiter stands up and gestures for her to follow his lead. 

“Come on, O’Hara, we’re going to lunch.” 

She looks up at him, confused. “It’s 10 o’clock in the morning, Carlton.”

“Fine. Then we’re going to breakfast. Come on.”

She looks pained, knowing where this is leading, but she gets her purse out of her desk and follows him out the door.

They don’t talk again until they’re seated in a corner booth at IHOP, where Lassiter takes them because he figures pancakes will be necessary for this conversation. Fiddling with his coffee cup and a sugar packet, he meets her eyes and says “O’Hara, tell me what’s going on.”

She looks away from his gaze, remains silent. 

He tries again. “O’Hara. _Juliet_."

The use of her first name at least has her looking at him again. “You know I’m terrible at this touchy-feely crap, but I’m worried about you. Will you please just tell me what happened between you and Spencer?”

Her lips tighten and she looks away again. “We broke up. I don’t know what else to tell you, Carlton.”

“I already knew you two had split up. Even if Guster hadn’t told me yesterday, the look on your face today would have clued me in. But, the night before Henry’s funeral? What happened, O’Hara?”

Juliet sighs, some of her resolve seeming to drain out of her. “He told me something that…upset me. A lot. It was something I just couldn’t handle, Carlton. I still can’t handle it.” Suddenly, distressingly, her eyes are filled with tears. “I don’t even know how you can stand to be partnered with me. I’m such an idiot.” 

“ _Hey!_ Don’t say that. You’re the smartest person I know. What could he possibly have told you that would make you…”

He trails off, because with a certainty like a puzzle piece clicking into place he knows what happened. He leans back in the booth and stares at her. 

“He told you, didn’t he? He told you how he does it. How he solves all the cases. Psychic ability my ass!” The surge of triumph at having six years of suspicions confirmed is short-lived at the expression on her face. 

“I can’t talk about this, Carlton. It’s better if we pretend that nothing has changed” she lowers her voice. “I don’t want to do anything that could endanger any convictions we got from cases he assisted with.” 

Lassiter shrugs. “Most of the time he got them to confess to everything short of stealing lunch money in the third grade, so I’m not sure any appeals in those cases would have a leg to stand on, but I get your point.”

Their pancakes arrive, and for a few minutes they both busy themselves with syrup and butter and coffee refills. After she’s had a few bites, Juliet pushes away her plate. 

“He played me for a fool. I can’t believe how naïve I was.”

“NO. Juliet, he had everyone fooled. Do you think Chief Vick is naive? She didn’t get to where she is by trusting in conmen. And dammit, as much as I hate to admit it, he solved cases. After seeing him close case after case, why would you not believe him?”

“You never did,” she says quietly. 

Lassiter takes a deep breath. “No. Well, mostly no. I mean, a frigging _dinosaur_? I’ve been trying to figure out for years how he knew that."

Juliet almost smiles at that, and Lassiter relaxes a little.

“It’s not that I never suspected. I’m not completely gullible, you know. I even thought that if he ever confessed that it wasn’t true that I would be able to accept it, move on. What he does is…” she heaves out a sigh of frustration “it’s pretty fucking impressive, Carlton. But when the time came, all I could think was that I was just like my mother, falling for a conman who could lie to my face every day. I don’t want to go through my life wondering how often I’m being lied to by someone I’m supposed to trust. Looking back over the past couple of years, I don’t even know anymore what was real.”

Lassiter wishes he were the kind of person who was good at comforting others, but he’s been told often enough, sometimes by O’Hara herself, that he sucks at that sort of thing. Still, he gives it his best shot.

“Look, I’m not interested in defending Spencer. I think you’re entitled to every bit of your anger and more. I will say though, that while he lied about his ‘abilities’, I don’t think he ever lied about how he felt about you, O’Hara. I think – no, I KNOW – that was real. I saw how he looked at you. The only thing you’re guilty of is trusting someone you loved, who loved you back. I can’t believe that makes you foolish or naïve.”

“Didn’t you once tell me that all romance ends in either death or despair? I should have listened to you then.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll know to listen to me from now on.” He throws some money on the table and stands up “All right, we have work to do. Carp has a hearing tomorrow and we owe it to Henry to make sure that we have an airtight case against him.”

O’Hara gets up to follow him. “God, _Henry_. How can I be so wrapped up in my boyfriend drama that I can’t focus on what happened to Henry?”

“I don’t know about you, but I have trouble thinking about it too closely,” Lassiter admits. “That he was betrayed by his own partner, by the guys he worked with on the force…so help me O’Hara, I would sooner eat my own gun than _ever_ …”

“Don’t say that!” she snaps “…but I know. Me too. I don’t understand how anything like this could happen. Over money? Just thinking about it makes me feel sick, and knowing that Henry’s last thoughts were to realize how badly he had been deceived by the people he should have been able to trust most in the world…” 

“We’ll nail this bastard to the wall.” Lassiter shrugs helplessly “It’s not enough, but it’s the only thing we can do.”

He’s just pulled into his parking space at the station when she turns to him and says “Aren’t you going to ask me how Shawn does it? How he pulled off the psychic act for so long?”

Lassiter turns to look at her, as sure about this as he’s ever been about anything.

“Don’t you dare tell me anything, O’Hara. He owes me that explanation himself. I’ll get it out of him the next time I see him.”


	2. Chapter 2

Weeks pass, and life resumes to normal. Or, not quite normal. A new normal, Lassiter thinks. A normal without Henry Spencer offering suggestions and criticisms, without the Psych duo making a nuisance of themselves at the station right before miraculously solving the case. Work feels more like _work_ than it has in a long time without Spencer around making Juliet and Buzz laugh, distracting Lassiter with a dizzying barrage of nonsense. Lassiter would rather French kiss a hippie than admit it, but he kind of misses the chaos. Somehow, he had gotten used to the whirlwind of energy Spencer provided, and he had grown to enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out how Shawn made the remarkable intuitive leaps that inevitably always led to a conviction. 

He can’t believe he’s even thinking this, but he even misses the sound of Spencer’s voice calling out “Lassie!” in greeting. He had hated that stupid, demeaning nickname until one day it occurred to him that Spencer always designated nicknames for the people he liked most: Guster was Gus and Juliet was Jules and he was Lassie, and for Shawn, that seemed to be a way of conveying affection. After he recognized that, Lassiter found that he didn’t mind it so much, and it had become second nature over the years to respond to it, though his first instinct had been to cringe when he realized that Shawn had literally given him a pet name.

Lassiter knows that he should be angry now that he finally has confirmation that Spencer is a liar, but he finds that, strangely enough, he’s not. Maybe it’s simply that the memory of Shawn’s hands and clothes covered with Henry’s blood from trying in vain to staunch the bleeding is too fresh in his mind for him to feel anything other than pity.

He’s believed from the very beginning that the psychic story was bullshit, clinging to that belief even after Spencer passed a lie detector test, and now that he knows that he was right all along, he can’t help but feeling that the revelation is a little anti-climactic. It would have been far more shocking and upsetting to have hard proof that psychic powers really existed. Lassiter feels like he used up most of his anger on the subject a long time ago, and now he’s just curious about the details of how Spencer does it. 

He thinks he’s mostly figured it out, but he’s still missing a few key pieces of information. He remembers a snippet of an argument he heard between Henry and Shawn once, a year or so ago, not long after Henry had been brought on as the consultant liaison. Lassiter had been heading for the break room for a cup of coffee when he was stopped by the sound of raised voices coming from a nearby conference room. He knew that Shawn had been irritated because his dad hadn’t been allowing him to consult on any cases recently, and he had paused to listen, his natural curiosity beating out his inclination to give the father and son some privacy. 

Shawn so rarely showed his temper that Lassiter had been taken aback by the cold fury in his voice.

“You’re the one who made me this way Henry, and now you won’t let me use it? What the hell are you trying to do to me?”

“I raised you to be a cop, not a…whatever it is you are now. A flake. You don’t take anything seriously. You don’t belong here.”

There was a long moment of silence before Shawn spoke again, and when he did his tone was measured and careful, like he was trying to control his anger.

“Sometimes I think I should never have come back to Santa Barbara. It’s good to know that you feel the same way.”

“Shawn-"

“I understand, though. You’re just pissed because I’m a better detective than you ever were."

“You can be such a little asshole, Shawn.”

“Yeah, well, I learned from the best.”

Shawn had stalked out then, and Lassiter ducked around the corner so he wouldn’t be seen.  
If Lassiter remembered correctly, it was within a day or two of that argument that Henry had brought the Psych duo in on a case.

So, Henry had made him this way, whatever that meant. Trained him to be a cop. There was more to it than just that, there had to be. Lassiter looks forward to the day when he can get Shawn to explain it. 

About three weeks after Henry’s funeral, a high profile murder lands on Lassiter’s desk. A prominent businessman found stabbed to death in a locked office, exactly the kind of offbeat puzzle that would have had Spencer all over it. O’Hara digs into the case with an intensity that Lassiter hasn’t seen from her since the early days of their partnership, when she felt she had needed to prove herself to him, and every time Lassiter sees the evidence of her sleepless nights and witnesses the insane amount of hours she puts into the case, he’s filled with the overwhelming urge to find Spencer and punch him in the face for ever making O’Hara doubt in her own abilities. But then he’ll listen to the voicemail he still has saved and hear the way Shawn’s voice breaks when he talks about Juliet and think that wherever he is, Shawn is probably punishing himself enough.

O’Hara’s diligence pays off when she figures out how the businessman’s former partner was able to circumvent office security via a complicated scheme involving silly putty and a dog whistle. Lassiter wonders, not for the first time, how it is that Santa Barbara has so many weirdass murders, but all he says is “Good work, O’Hara” before privately going to Chief Vick to make sure that she knows that O’Hara did all the grunt work on the case and should get all the credit. 

The Chief is pleased, and maybe she also recognizes that Juliet needs the distraction and satisfaction of hard work, because one day not long after that she calls O’Hara into her office and tells her that she’s going to be training a new junior detective, just the way Lassiter trained her. Vick assures both Lassiter and Juliet that she’s not breaking up their partnership, only that this will be a good experience for O’Hara, but Lassiter can see the writing on the wall. O’Hara is young and smart and talented and far more personable than he has ever been; it’s only a matter of time before she starts moving up the ranks, maybe even getting offers from other law enforcement agencies. Instead of feeling jealous at these thoughts, as he expected he might, he only feels insanely proud of her and proud that he might have played any part in helping shape her into the detective that she’s become. His lack of jealousy might have another factor as well: he’s distracted by the fact that Marlowe is about to be released from prison. 

The day Marlowe comes home, comes to HIS home, is the happiest Lassiter can remember feeling in years. Finally, finally, his life can get back on the track that it was derailed from when Victoria left him. His anticipation over Marlowe coming to live with him is so far from his usual cynicism that later, when it all falls apart, he can’t believe that it was him filled with all that hope and expectation. 

For the first few days, weeks even, it’s amazing having this beautiful woman that he’s been waiting for in his home, his bed, his life. But before long, it becomes apparent that maybe he’s rushed into something without enough consideration. He only knew Marlowe for a very brief time before she went to prison, and while there had been lots of visits and letters in the intervening months, it’s a lot different trying to actually live with someone on a day-to-day basis than it is daydreaming about living with someone. The truth is, he doesn’t really know her that well, any better than she knows him, and the honeymoon phase of their relationship is over before he knows it.

Two months after Marlowe moves in with him, she’s moving out after giving him a gentle “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, and the crushing disappointment Lassiter feels over the failure of this relationship seems multiplied by grief over Henry’s death, by the feeling he has that O’Hara will be moving on soon, and by the weird, sad, unexplainable absence he’s felt since Shawn left.

So maybe that’s why, one night when he’s driving home from work and sees Guster’s silly blue car in the parking lot of a bar, he finds himself going in to catch up with the more responsible half of the Psych duo. Guster is sitting at the bar alone, alleviating Lassiter’s worries that he might be interrupting a date, and his face actually lights up when he sees Lassiter, looking happy to see him in a way that he previously only looked on the occasions when Lassiter was rushing in to save him and Shawn from whichever deranged killer was threatening them that week. 

“Lassie! Have a seat!” Guster gestures to the barstool next to him, and is he _drunk_? “I’m celebrating! Have a drink with me.”

“Oh? What are you celebrating?” Because Guster doesn’t actually look happy. 

“Promotion. Big raise, new office. Apparently, all I needed to do was show up for work every single day.”

“Oh! Well, congratulations! That’s great news.”

Gus laughs without any evident mirth, and it actually sends a little chill down Lassiter’s spine to hear Guster sounding so bleak. “Yeah, it’s awesome. “ He leans closer and says in a confidential manner “Do you wanna know a secret? If you ever repeat this to anyone, I’ll deny it, but: pharmaceutical sales is BORING. I miss being a private detective.” He sighs and rests his elbows on the bar, his forehead in his hands, and in an even quieter voice says “I miss Shawn." 

“Have you heard from him?”

Gus shrugs. “A couple of postcards. One from some crazy tourist attraction in Nebraska called Carhenge. Another from Minnesota showing the biggest ball of twine in the world. He texted a few times, but not in a while. I don’t think he has his phone anymore."

“How can you stand it? For the last six years the two of you seemed practically inseparable, and now you don’t even know where he is.”

“Shawn is…he’s like more than a brother to me, you know? I know that he’s hurting right now. This is how he copes, getting some distance, distracting his mind with other things. I don’t have to like it, but I understand that about him. Plus,” Gus hesitates before plunging on “he knows he’s responsible for hurting Juliet, and he wanted to give her some space.”

“So she wouldn’t shoot him.” Lassiter nods understandingly.

“Well, I was thinking so that she could heal, but yeah, that too.” Gus pauses again, takes another sip of his beer, gathering up some liquid courage, before asking “By the way, how is Juliet?”

If he had been asked that question a few weeks ago, Lassiter knows he would have lashed out, said Juliet was pissed and heartbroken and that Spencer is lucky he left town before Lassiter could catch up to him, but what he says now is “…Better. She’s been on fire lately at work, closing cases left and right, training a junior detective. Sometimes I know she’s thinking about Spencer, but she’s not dwelling on it. She’s moving on.”

Guster nods, looking pleased. “Good. That’s really good to know. Shawn can be so damn thoughtless sometimes, but he never meant to hurt her.”

And okay, maybe Lassiter does still have some anger bottled up about this. “Maybe he didn’t mean to, but he lied to her from the day they met! He was lying to her the whole time they were sleeping together! How was she supposed to feel about that? How could she not be hurt by that?”

Gus holds up a hand placatingly. “You don’t have to tell me! I know. I know how wrong it was. I know she must hate me too for the part I played in helping Shawn convince her he was –"

“Shut up,” Lassiter interrupts “Don’t tell me anything, don’t admit to anything. The last thing I want to do tonight is get pissed off over this and end up arresting you for fraud.”

Okay, and now Guster looks terrified, which is not exactly what Lassiter had in mind when he came into the bar. He sighs and signals the bartender for two more beers. 

“How’s your sister?” he asks, which he knows is completely out of left field, but he’s trying to wipe the scared look off of the other man’s face, and yep, that does it. Now Gus just looks suspicious.

“Why do you want to know about Joy? I thought we had a silent understanding that sisters were off-limits, and anyway I think she’s considering becoming a nun, or possibly a lesbian…wait a minute. Isn’t Marlowe out of jail by now?”

Well, crap. That wasn’t the direction he wanted to take the conversation in either. “Yeah, she is. It didn’t work out between us.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that. Dude, could this year have sucked any more for any of us?”

Lassiter can only agree.


	3. Chapter 3

Not long after that, O’Hara comes to him and asks if they can have dinner together because she needs to talk to him about something, and Lassiter’s heart sinks because he knows that this can only mean one thing. 

“I got a call last week from a recruiter with the U.S. Marshal’s Service.”

They’re sitting in a little Mexican restaurant two blocks away from the police station. Lassiter has tried to brace himself for this conversation, but it still feels like a shock. 

O’Hara continues, her eyes focused on her enchiladas instead of on him. “They said they had been impressed by our arrest record, and that they need more female marshals, that they’re looking to diversify their ranks. They offered me a job.” She looks up at him, and there are unshed tears glistening in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Carlton. I can’t imagine not working at the SBPD.”

“O’Hara,” he reaches across the table to take her hand “if you let this opportunity pass you by, I’ll never forgive you, and more importantly, you’ll never forgive yourself. Take the job.”

After that, things seem to move too fast. A little less than a month later and Lassiter is at O’Hara’s going away party, though at least she’s not going very far; she’s being assigned to the Santa Barbara field office. Lassiter has had too much to drink and he knows it, but he can’t quite seem to make himself stop. The alcohol softens the unwanted jealousy he feels about O’Hara getting offered a job with the Marshals, and it smoothes over the fear he feels that he’ll never again have a partner that he gets along with as well as he does with her.  
They’re at Tom Blair’s Pub, and now that it’s after midnight, the party is starting to wrap up. 

Juliet is hugging McNab, standing up on her tiptoes to get her arms around his neck, and he lifts her up in a big bear hug, a few tears glistening on his cheeks as O’Hara whispers something in his ear. Good God man, Lassiter wants to say, pull yourself together, but he doesn’t have the energy. Buzz leaves and O’Hara comes back to the table, where it’s just her and Lassiter now, sliding into the booth beside him to rest her head on his shoulder. She’s drunk too, as evidenced by the fact that she’s picked up his hand and is playing with his fingers, humming softly to herself. 

“I can’t drive right now,” Lassiter says “and clearly you can’t either. Wanna share a taxi?”

“Sounds good, partner” she replies a little sadly, and he fishes his phone out of his pocket to make the call. 

He gives the cab driver directions to O’Hara’s apartment first, and she holds his hand for the entire drive, not letting go when they get to her place. “Come in with me,” she says. “I’m not ready for tonight to be over yet.”

He stumbles into the apartment after her, following her to the sofa, where she pulls him down beside her, pulling his arm around her shoulder and curling herself into his side. Lassiter feels a little awkward because he and Juliet have never been so overtly physical, and in any case he’s never been particularly adept at expressing affection, but she’s warm and soft beside him and after a few minutes he relaxes, inhaling the mixture of her fresh peach scent and the fruity girly drinks she had been putting away all night. 

“I’m scared,” she says quietly. “I’m scared about what’s going to happen once I start this job. What if they find out I’m not good enough?”

“Why the hell would you think that?”

“Because they noticed me because of our case solve rate, and I don’t know how much of that was due to Shawn. What if I get there and they discover I’m a fraud?”

“Damn it O’Hara, not this again! Who’s been solving cases since Spencer left town, huh? Who arrested the Banyon Street Killer, and solved the Wozinski robbery?”

“We did,” she says, sounding a little more confident. “You’re right, I know you are.”

“Damn straight. I could kill Spencer for messing with your head like this. Look, I must be really drunk or I would never say this, but however he did what he did, Spencer was obviously an amazing detective. Maybe we relied on him a little too much the last couple of years. But just because he was good, that doesn’t mean you aren’t good too."

“Thank you, Carlton” she says softly, and he’s confused, because shouldn’t he be thanking her for smelling so nice, and for the way her soft breasts are pressed against his side? 

Maybe he shouldn’t have had that last drink. Or more accurately, the last three. 

“Thank you for training me, and for being my partner, and for being my friend." She tips her head back and kisses him on the cheek, hesitates a moment, then moves her mouth a fraction of an inch so that she’s really kissing him. She shifts, swinging one leg around so that she’s straddling him, and now they’re necking like teenagers, and oh, it’s nice. It’s REALLY nice. Juliet, his smart, brave, competent partner, with her tongue in his mouth and her fingers in his hair, gasping a little when he pulls her closer.

It might be nice, but it’s also totally weird. Lassiter wants to move his hands, but the thought of being grabby with his partner is so alien that he feels frozen. For all that she instigated things, O’Hara seems similarly stiff; she’s still kissing him, but she feels practically rigid in his arms.

After a few minutes, she pulls away and smiles a little ruefully. “This isn’t going to happen, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” he replies, not without a degree of sadness, because as warm and welcome as she is against him, kissing her like this should be more than just “nice”. 

She moves off of his lap. “Don’t leave,” she commands, as she starts to walk out of the room. “I’m just going to put us on some coffee. I think you should stay here tonight.” She blushes at his confused look “In the guest room! I’m still really tipsy, and I think you are too.”

He waits on the sofa, willing himself not to replay the last few minutes in his mind, trying to figure out if he regretted that they had stopped or if he was relieved.

“We don’t have the right kind of chemistry,” she says from the doorway. He looks up at her. She’s still looking a little blushy, not quite meeting his eyes. She reaches out to hand him a cup of coffee, and he gets up to take it, then sits back down, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“I mean, we have great chemistry in other ways, but we’ve spent so long ignoring and suppressing any kind of um, sexual feelings towards each other that we’ve missed our chance.”

Yeah, it’s relief. This, with O’Hara, is the best relationship he’s ever had with a woman, including his ex-wife, and he doesn’t want anything, especially an ill-advised drunken hook-up, to ruin it. 

“Shawn and I had chemistry,” she muses, resting her head against the doorframe. Lassiter winces slightly; this is the most she’s talked about Spencer since the day after Henry’s funeral, and he’s not sure he’s comfortable with it. “Not intense, passionate chemistry exactly, but fun chemistry. We had fun together. Although sometimes, I felt like I was playing den mother to him and Gus.”

She takes a sip of her coffee, then adds thoughtfully “You had great chemistry with Shawn too.”

Lassiter chokes on his coffee and Juliet’s eyes widen. “Oh! Not that kind of chemistry! I mean, I didn’t think the two of you were going to start making out or anything.” Her forehead furrows slightly “Well, not most of the time, anyway. Just that you worked well together, you know? You butted heads all the time, but there was always an arrest at the end of the case. That’s good chemistry.”

Lassiter sets his coffee cup down and stands up carefully, because his head is still spinning. “If you’re finished insulting me,” he says, keeping his tone light so that she can tell that he’s not actually mad “I’m going to go sleep this off and try to forget that we ever had this conversation. Where’s the guest room?”

She points down the hallway. “On the left. If you want to take a shower in the morning, there are towels in the hall closet.” She hugs him. “Thank you again, Carlton. Good night.”

He passes out as soon as he hits the sheets, and awakens a few hours later in a strange bed, feeling like he’s floating in between sleep and consciousness. His head hurts, but not as much as it probably should after the amount he drank the night before, and he can still recall with perfect clarity O’Hara talking about chemistry. Most of the time, she didn’t think the two of them were going to start making out, she had said about him and Shawn. Spencer. His mind drifts back to a night a few years before, before Spencer had started dating Juliet, not long after the Drimmer incident.

He and Spencer had been on a stakeout. O’Hara was on vacation in Miami visiting friends, and half the department was out sick with some sort of flu, and somehow Chief Vick thought the obvious solution to their manpower problem was to send Spencer out on an overnight stakeout with Lassiter, despite the fact that Carlton insisted he would be much happier going it alone. 

Stuck in a car for eight hours with a hyperactive man-child was not Lassiter’s idea of a good night on the job, but he resolved to make the best of it, a resolution that lasted approximately twenty-five minutes in, as Spencer debated who was the better reality show judge, Nigel St. Nigel versus Simon Cowell, put his sneakered feet up on the dashboard, and got cheez doodle fingerprints all over the car. Lassiter had finally snapped at Shawn to stop acting like an ill-mannered teenager, and Shawn shot him a look so amused that Lassiter wondered briefly if Spencer had been _trying_ to get under his skin. If so, mission accomplished. 

After that, Spencer contented himself with playing with the radio and making the occasional smart-ass remark about passing cars and pedestrians. At one point he started a surprisingly non-annoying conversation about Clint Eastwood movies (they both agreed that _The Outlaw Josey Wales_ was an underrated classic), but for the most part he was quiet, though he fidgeted almost constantly, tapping his fingers or his foot. Lassiter decided he could live with the fidgeting if it meant keeping this, dare he even think it, congenial peace between them. 

It was around four o’clock in the morning when Lassiter noticed that Spencer was staring at his hands. Or, maybe he wasn’t; it was entirely possible he was more asleep than awake, since he had been quiet for an unusually long period of time, so long that Lassiter was startled when he spoke. 

“The spirits are telling me that I should read your palm, Lassie.”

“What?!” Lassiter jerked back slightly in his seat, taken off guard, but before he could react further Shawn had snatched his right hand and was holding it palm up in a surprisingly strong grip, examining it closely by the dim light provided by the streetlights. 

“Spencer, what the hell – “Lassiter started to say, but Shawn interrupted him. 

“Sshhh, Lassie. Psychic at work here.”

“I’m not interested in your psychic bullshit –"

But Shawn continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, reaching with his free hand to touch one of the lines on Lassiter’s palm.

“This is your life line," he said, tracing the line with his finger. “Don’t worry, Lassie, it’s nice and long. You’ll live to see the Grumpy Old Cop’s Retirement Home. Now, see this? This is your head line. See how it and the life line start at the same point? That means that you’re ruled by logic. That’s why you have so much trouble accepting my amazing powers.”

As he spoke, Shawn continued to gently map the lines with his fingertip, following the dips and whorls of Lassiter’s palm with a soft, barely there touch, and Lassiter caught his breath as he realized he was suddenly, ragingly hard, aroused in a way that he couldn’t remember being since he and Victoria had been lusty newlyweds. And all because Shawn – Spencer, of all people! – was holding his hand. He only hoped that the poor lighting in the car would make it impossible for Shawn to make out his condition. He knew that he should pull away, but as loathe as he was to admit it, he didn’t want to because it felt so good.

“This is your heart line. The little lines going through it mean you’ve suffered heartbreak. Poor Lassie.” Shawn’s thumb stroked across the lines, as if he could erase them with a touch. “But see, the second half of your heart line is strong and unbroken. Good things are coming your way.”

Shawn had been leaning forward slightly, looking at Lassiter from underneath his lashes, an unusually intent expression on his face. Lassiter found himself responding in kind, shifting a little closer and unwittingly licking his lips as he looked at Shawn’s mouth. 

“Lassie," Shawn started to say, then blinked like he was waking from a dream. “Is that Bradshaw coming out of the warehouse?”

“Shit!” Lassiter yanked his hand away from Shawn, focusing on the suspect they were supposed to be watching in the first place and cursing himself for falling into Spencer’s web of weirdness for even a few minutes. 

Chemistry. Lassiter relives the memory of Shawn’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, feeling like maybe it was all a dream. He’s heavy and slack with sleep, and something else too as he realizes that his hand has slipped inside his boxers. 

No. He’s not going to jerk off in Juliet’s spare bedroom. He’s not a fucking teenager; he has more control than that. Or if not control, he at least knows to take a cold shower.

He makes it to the shower, but at the first blast of cold water his resolve melts and he adjusts the temperature to something more comfortable, which does nothing to abate his hard-on but which does do wonders for his headache. He leans his forehead against the tile, and he can’t seem to stop himself from reaching down to wrap his hand around his cock. When he comes, it’s not to thoughts of Juliet’s sweet, drunken groping, or Marlowe’s post-prison enthusiasm, or even his ever reliable pin-up girl fantasies, but to the memory of Shawn’s fingers skimming across the palm of his hand.


	4. Chapter 4

Lassiter rubs his jaw gingerly, trying to ignore the throbbing as he finishes filling out his paperwork. The day before, he had chased a carjacker who resisted arrest and slugged him in the jaw. Lassiter had responded by felling his assailant with one punch, a satisfying end to the incident, but now his jaw hurts like a bitch. 

Filling out the report of the incident conjures up a memory of Spencer sitting across from his desk hours after saving O’Hara’s ex-boyfriend Scott from the murderous federal marshal that was planning to kill him. Spencer had been there for Lassiter to officially take his statement, which had devolved into him excitedly recounting the details of the physical altercation that took place before the police arrived.

“…and then I did this totally cool flippy thing. Like, I was flat on my back and then _whoosh_ , I was on my feet.” He made what Lassiter imagined was supposed to be an identical flippy motion with his hand. “I’d do it for you again now, but I wouldn’t want you to swoon at my feet right here at the station. Also, I have a feeling adrenaline might have played a part.”

Lassiter had been looking over the medical report on Marshal Wayne while Spencer talked, and one detail made him pause. 

“He had teeth marks on his ankle?”

“Uh, I might have bit him while we were fighting” Spencer at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. 

“You bit him on the ankle?” Lassiter asked, his eyebrows raised in disbelief.

“It’s possible I also slapped him. Feel free to leave that out of the report.”

“No way. I want it on record that you fight like a ten year old girl.”

Lassiter finished writing and thrust the statement in front of Spencer. 

“Sign.”

Spencer glanced it over, then scribbled his name at the bottom of the page, but instead of handing it back over the desk, he had stood up and walked behind Lassiter’s chair, coming to stand right behind him. He leaned over Lassiter’s shoulder, way too close, and carefully set the paperwork down in front of him, resting a hand on the desk as he lowered himself so that his mouth was even with Lassiter’s ear. 

“What can I say, Lassie? I’m a loverrrr, not a fighterrrrr,” he said, rolling his rs like he was still on that stupid telenovela. The puff of air on Lassiter’s ear made him twitch.

Spencer slapped his hand down on the desk as he straightened and moved away, talking loudly.  
“I think I deserve a burrito after today! Lassie, you wanna buy me a burrito?”

“No.”

Spencer smirked at him. “Fine. I’ll find someone else to fill my delicious nutritional needs. Hey Buzz, you up for lunch?” He sauntered away, and Lassiter had most definitely not been watching his ass as he went.

Lassiter is interrupted from his reverie by the sound of his name being called. 

”Detective Lassiter, can I see you in my office please?”

Chief Vick gestures for him to close the door as he walks in, and Lassiter braces himself.  
“Is this about what happened with Swanson yesterday? Look, I’m sorry I yelled, but if he can’t gather evidence without –"

Vick looks startled. “What? No, Swanson didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.” Lassiter drops into the chair in front of her desk. “Then what’s this about?”

“Carlton, have you considered taking some time off?” she holds up her hand to stop him from interrupting, because he’s already sputtering in outrage. “It’s been a rough year for all of us, but you’ve had the brunt of it. You and Detective O’Hara had a few bumps along the way, but you were great partners, and I know you were close, and now she’s gone. You and Henry occasionally went fishing together, to say nothing of the fact that you worked together, but you didn’t take any time off at all after he died. And of course, you worked more frequently with Shawn and Mr. Guster than any other detective in the precinct, and despite the fact that they weren’t officially employees of the department, I know everyone around here has felt their absence very strongly. I know you and Mr. Spencer had a…tumultuous… relationship, but I think you probably miss him. I know I do.”

Shit, shit, shit, Lassiter thinks. He needs work, because without it he doesn’t know what he would do with himself. 

“I took a week off when Marlowe moved in!” he says triumphantly. 

“And then you worked overtime during the weeks after she left. I just think you could use a vacation, Carlton. You haven’t taken any real time off in several years, and you have more than four months worth of leave saved up. Now might be good opportunity to consider using some of it. Swanson didn’t say anything about yesterday, but I’ve had other officers comment on how volatile you’ve been lately. I know that I need to find you a new partner, but frankly, I’m reluctant to team you up with anyone right now. I think you’d scare them away.”

Lassiter takes a deep breath to steady himself before speaking. “Chief, I know I’ve been a little short-tempered lately. You’re right, it’s been a rough year, but I’d prefer not to use any of my vacation time right now. I’ll work on controlling my temper, okay? Please Karen, I’d like to work. And don’t worry about getting me a new partner just yet. I’ll be okay on my own for a while.”

He hates that he sounds like he’s begging, but he’s prepared to do anything if it will make her listen to him. 

She hesitates, then nods. “Fine. But please reconsider. I need you at the top of your game, Carlton, and you need a partner. This department has suffered too many losses lately. The last thing I want is for my head detective to burn out.”

Lassiter thanks the Chief and leaves as quickly as he can. Goes home and pours himself a drink. He’s drinking too much lately, he knows it, but nothing else dulls the edges of his loneliness. The thought of taking time off from work, of the vast acres of time that would open up to him without his job, scares him. What would he do on a vacation? Visit his mother? The thought makes him shudder and finish the whiskey in one gulp. 

Vick is right though, he’s got to reign himself in. He can’t keep snapping at the other detectives and officers, and he can’t keep drinking by himself at home every night. It’s with that thought in mind that he goes the next night to the bar where he had drinks with Guster before, because having drinks with someone else has got to be better than drinking alone, right? Even though he came specifically looking for Gus, it’s almost a surprise to find him there again.

“One or two nights a week,” Guster replies with a shrug when Lassiter asks him how often he comes here. “My apartment is just…it’s too quiet sometimes, you know?”

Lassiter knows. 

“Don’t get me wrong,” Gus hastens to add “I keep busy. I volunteer at the fire department twice a month, I go to tap class every week, I have my book club meetings, and next month I’m taking a class in building dioramas. Plus, work is keeping me busy with the promotion and all.”

Lassiter supposes the subtext of this is that Guster is trying to convince himself that he’s doing fine without Shawn around, but in his opinion, the evidence is pretty pathetic. Not that he has any room to judge. 

“Have you heard from Spencer lately?” he asks, his curiosity getting the better of him. 

“Another postcard. This time from some sort of dinosaur theme park in Virginia.”

“Does he say anything on these postcards?”

“Just, wish you were here, I’m doing fine. Nothing else.”

“Have you ever thought about just going to the most recent place he sent a postcard from and trying to find him?”

Guster shakes his head “I think he would already be gone by the time I could get there. I doubt that he stays in one place for very long.”

“What does he do for money?”

“You’ve read his resume, haven’t you? He picks up odd jobs all along the way. Bartending, waiting tables. He’s a certified lifeguard, and I think he’s worked in something like half of the baseball stadiums in the country.”

Lassiter shakes his head “I can’t imagine living like that.”

“No man, me neither. Shawn likes the distraction, though. Learning new things, meeting new people. It probably keeps him from thinking too much about his dad.”

“You know, the day I met him, he told me that he hated his father.”

“He did, for a long time. Look, I respected Mr. Spencer. He was a big influence on me as a kid, and I know he tried to do right by Shawn. But he put so much pressure on him to become like, a supercop or something. Shawn’s never quite gotten over that.“ Gus shakes his head “Dude, why are we talking about this? How is everyone at the station? How’s Juliet?”

“O’Hara isn’t with the SBPD anymore,” Lassiter replies, startled to realize that Guster isn’t aware of his former partner’s new job. “She took a job with the U.S. Marshals.”

“Holy shit!” Gus gasps, which is almost funny because Lassiter could probably count on one hand the number of times he’s heard Guster swear. “Does that mean you have a new partner?”

“Not yet.”

“I know it’s hard, working alone when you’re used to having a partner.”

Lassiter doesn’t reply, just takes another drink of his beer, but he’s thinking that what it is, is damn lonely. He knows that six years ago he never would have believed that he would be anything but relieved to be rid of his obnoxiously perky partner and the abrasively weird duo from the fake psychic detective agency, but the truth is that he misses working with them all like crazy. They were a team. An argumentative, occasionally dysfunctional team, but a team nonetheless. 

Meeting Guster for drinks becomes a semi-regular occurrence over the next few weeks. While the two of them don’t have a lot in common, they do at least know some of the same people. So Lassiter is able to tell Gus that Buzz’s wife is expecting their first baby, and how Chief Vick is handling the fact that her daughter is old enough to start kindergarten, and that Woody has started a blog dedicated to strange stomach contents he’s found when conducting autopsies. Gus talks about some of the weirder doctors on his route and, after a few drinks, childhood memories of hanging out with Shawn. After a few more drinks he’ll even open up about some of the cases he and Shawn had worked on alongside Lassiter, and while he doesn’t give away any details of how Shawn worked his “psychic” magic, he does let slip that he’s the half of the duo adept at lock-picking and safe-cracking. Lassiter knows that as an officer of the law he should be concerned about this revelation, but really he’s just surprised. 

“Guster, don’t take this the wrong way, but that seems like an out-of-character hobby for you to take up. You don’t even drive over the speed limit!”

Gus sniffs. “Hmmph. I’ll have you know, Danger is my middle name.” He pauses “Also, I like puzzles. And being better than Shawn at something.”

Lassiter never imagined the two of them might become something approaching friends, but the thing is, he has this weird, indefensible urge to talk about Spencer, and Gus is the one person he can indulge in that with.

“Shawn would have made a good Han Solo” Lassiter observes blearily one night, thinking back to the Halloween picture in Shawn’s bedroom, and how many beers has he had, anyway?

Fortunately, Gus is well-versed in following non-sequiters, and he shakes his head “Nah, Shawn is Luke Skywalker, but don’t tell him I said that. Father issues, spooky mental powers – ”

“He’s not psychic! And don’t tell me he uses the Force.”

“Whatever. How many cases did he solve? Anyway, mental powers, the way he gets restless and leaves home.” Gus clears his throat before he gets anymore maudlin. “You’re Han Solo, Lassie. You’re the one who rushes in at the last minute with the Millenium Falcon and saves the day."

Lassiter narrows his eyes, secretly incredibly flattered to be compared to Han Solo, and asks “Does that mean that O’Hara is Chewbacca because she was my partner? Or is she Princess Leia because she’s the girl?” He gapes slightly thinking back to the night he and O’Hara had kissed on her couch. “If she’s Leia, does that mean that she and I should end up together?”

Guster reaches out to take Lassiter’s beer bottle away. “I am cutting you off, man. Juliet is Leia, not because she’s the girl, but because she would totally not let Darth Vader intimidate her, and she would strangle Jabba the Hut with chains without breaking a sweat. And no, her being Leia doesn’t mean that you end up with her. In this version of the story, I think Han Solo has the hots for Luke Skywalker."

Gus stands up before Lassiter can react to that pronouncement. “Excuse me. I have to go pee now.” 

When Gus comes back to the table a few minutes later, looking slightly more sober and more than slightly wary, Lassiter is drinking from a glass of water and giving the tabletop more thoughtful consideration than it probably deserves.

“You know who you are?” He asks abruptly, as Gus sits down carefully. “You’re the robots. The ones who are always following Luke around trying to keep him out of trouble.”

Gus is so outraged that he forgets all about any embarrassing accusations he might have flung around mere minutes before.

“You did not just compare me to C3PO! I am not C3PO, Lassiter! Maaaaaybe R2D2. He was badass.”

Privately, Lassiter thinks that the comparison to C3PO is dead-on: Guster and the robot are both loyal, cautious, and fussy, and he can imagine C3PO reacting exactly the way Gus does in the morgue. 

Instead of pointing all this out, he says “What did you mean by that? What you said before you went to the bathroom?”

Guster shifts uncomfortably in his chair and doesn’t meet Lassiter’s eyes. “Dude. Lassie. I’m really drunk right now. I don’t even remember what I said.”

Lassiter huffs out an exasperated breath. “Yes you do. I’m not going to shoot you, Guster. Just tell me what you meant.”

“What about punching me? Are you going to punch me? Because if I start talking about this, I think you might.”

“No punching either,” Lassiter promises. “Why would you say that, um, Han Solo has the hots for Luke Skywalker?”

Gus looks up, as if beseeching the heavens for help, but the only thing above him is the dingy ceiling of the bar they’re in, and it’s no help at all. He takes a restorative gulp of his beer before speaking.

“Look, you know Shawn had, like, a massive crush on you for years.”

Lassiter is baffled. “WHAT? How could I possibly have known that?”

“Uh uh. No. No bullshit. If we’re actually going to discuss this, and believe me, I’d be happier if we didn’t, then you can’t act all oblivious. You had to have known. Shawn _literally_ threw himself at you. He sat in your lap, smacked you on the ass, groped you at every possible opportunity. He solved cases for you. I’ve never seen him crush on anyone for as long as he did you, but he finally convinced himself that either he had read you wrong and you were so straight that you missed all of his ridiculously obvious hints, or that you just weren’t interested.”

“But…but…” Lassiter is flailing, both mentally and literally, waving his hands in (somewhat drunken) consternation “Spencer is STRAIGHT. What about O’Hara? Or that little schoolteacher he dated? Or the COUNTLESS women I watched him flirt with over the years? And,” he added, jabbing a finger in Gus’s direction, “if he’s gay, then why aren’t the two of you married already?”

Gus rolls his eyes. “Hello, because I’M straight? Don’t let the pastels fool you. I just know what makes me look good. Anyway, Shawn isn’t gay so much as…open to every possibility. The way he explained it to me is that he’s attracted to personalities, not gender. Also, if you’d been paying attention over the years, you would have noticed him flirting with plenty of guys. I mean, you’ve seen him with Desperaeux, right?”

Lassiter boggles at Gus. “So wait, you’re saying he’s attracted to my _personality_?”

“Dude, I don’t get it either. The point is, he never just came out and told you because he was afraid that if he was misreading your signals, you might shoot him. Or at the very least, it might make working with you awkward. So he moved on to Juliet. Which,” Gus adds hastily “is not to say that what he had with Juliet wasn’t one hundred percent real. It absolutely was. I’m just saying that it probably would never have developed if you had been clearer about reciprocating his interest.”

Lassiter is still reeling, but he forces himself to focus on what Guster is saying. “Okay, so what makes you so sure that I was ‘reciprocating’ at all?” He makes little air quotes around “reciprocating”, confirming both to himself and Gus that he’s still kind of drunk.

“Carlton. Come on. The groping wasn’t all one-sided. No one manhandles another person as much as you did Shawn unless you want to be touching him, and it seemed like you wanted to be touching him A LOT. There was also the fact that you always let Shawn get away with practically fondling you whenever he felt like it. It was almost as if you liked it. Also, for someone that you claimed not to trust, when it came to big things in your life, like getting you off a murder rap, or finding out who was harassing Sheriff Hank, you seemed to have no problem trusting him at all. But there was more than just that; Shawn seemed to think that the two of you had, you know…”

“Chemistry” Lassiter says softly, thinking back to what Juliet had said the night of her going away party.

“Exactly. I was never as sure about how you felt as Shawn was, at least not until last year.”

Lassiter looks at him sharply. “Last year? What did I do last year to make you think that I was…” he hesitates, then chokes out “interested in Spencer?”

Gus sighs. “Remember your promise not to shoot and/or punch me, okay? It was Marlowe.”

“What about her? I assumed you had reasonable observational skills Guster, but in case you failed to notice, she’s a woman. And she’s nothing like Spencer.”

“Lassie, you found out that Shawn and Jules were dating, and within what, like two weeks, you were diving headfirst into a serious relationship with a woman you barely knew. It was the most obvious rebound I’ve ever seen. You’ve hardly dated anyone since your wife divorced you, but as soon as you heard Shawn say that he loved Juliet, it was like you couldn’t get into a relationship fast enough. 

And as for Marlowe not being anything like Shawn? Dude, is it a coincidence that the woman you ended up with at that time was deceiving you? That you, Mr. Law-and-Order, fell for a lady who was lying to you when you met her? Right after finding out that Shawn was unavailable, when your biggest beef with him was that he was lying about being psychic? Don’t mock my observational skills, Lassiter. I know what I saw.”

“I cared about Marlowe! I thought I was in love with her.”

Gus nods sadly. “I know you did. Even now though Lassie, you’re hanging out with me so that we can talk about Shawn. Don’t get me wrong! I’m glad you’re here. It’s nice being around someone who misses him as much as I do.”

Lassiter scowls. “I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. None of it matters now. Spencer is gone, and even if he were here, he’d be with O’Hara. Also, he can be as open-minded or whatever as he wants, but I like women. I was married to one, remember? And sure, maybe there was some…experimentation when I was in college, a couple of one-night stands, a little fooling around, but that’s what college is for, right? To try different things?”

“Um, sure,” Gus replies, looking distinctly uncomfortable “For the record, I did not try those sort of things when I was in college, but I guess some people do.” He shrugs “Theoretically, if you and Shawn ever had gotten together, you would probably have killed each other within a matter of hours, but I don’t know. Maybe you’re just different enough that you could have made each other happy. That’s all I want for Shawn – for all of us – is some happiness.”

Lassiter looks into the empty glass sitting in front of him and sighs. “Guster, I don’t know if there’s any such thing.”

Later, in bed, he’s still mulling over this conversation. Specifically, he’s thinking about how and why he misses Spencer. Shawn has been gone for more than six months now, and Lassiter finds it a little disturbing how much he still thinks of the other man. It has to be because he’s still mildly obsessed with Spencer’s phenomenal case-solve rate. That’s the only explanation. The conversation with Guster earlier tonight had been ludicrous and never would have happened if Lassiter hadn’t been drunk. And yeah, okay, maybe he finds himself revisiting encounters between them more frequently than he would like, Shawn grabbing him while in the throes of a “vision”, touching his face, teasing him when he was wrong, and always, always watching him with his bright, interested eyes.

Lassiter has known since high school that he wasn’t exactly completely straight, and if he’s being perfectly honest maybe Spencer has featured in a few (okay, more than a few) late night masturbatory fantasies, but fantasizing about someone in order to get off and actually wanting that person in reality are two different things. He could never be genuinely attracted to a lying little conman like Spencer, and he’s sure he’ll stop wasting time thinking about him soon. Any day now.


	5. Chapter 5

It feels like something more than a coincidence when Lassiter gets the phone call the next day.

“Detective Lassiter? This is Declan Rand. I don’t know if you remember me. I – ”

Lassiter cuts him off. “You’re the millionaire fake criminal profiler who dated my partner for a few weeks. That’s a tough resume to forget. What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you Detective, but I still had your card, and calling Juliet about this would be…awkward. I’m in Atlanta on business right now, and I just ran into Shawn Spencer.”

Lassiter sits up straighter “Is that right?”

“I know it’s not any of my business, but I’m a little worried about him. He was working at a bar, and it seemed like he had been drinking pretty heavily, and frankly, he looked like hell. I was under the impression from something that Juliet said to me once that Shawn rarely drank very much because it…” there was a long pause as Declan seems to be fumbling for words “it inhibits his, um, psychic powers.”

Lassiter sighs. “He’s not psychic,” he says automatically “Tell me where you saw him.”

After he hangs up the phone, Lassiter sits staring at the scrap of paper that he wrote the information that Declan had given him on. He knows where Spencer is, at least for today. Now the question is, what’s he going to do about it?

****

“Chief, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to take some vacation time after all. Starting immediately. I don’t have any open cases that Lewis and Ramirez can’t handle.”

Chief Vick raises her eyebrows. “What brought on this change of heart?”

Lassiter hesitates, considers telling her the truth, or at least a close approximation of the truth, but prevaricates instead, saying “Some personal business has come up that I need to deal with. I have to go out of town. Would it be a problem if I take two weeks of my vacation time?”

“Go ahead, Carlton, if you need the time off then take it. You’ve earned it. Just let me know if there’s anything I can help with, all right?”

He buys a plane ticket, books a room at a hotel right down the street from the bar that Declan said Shawn was working at. This is crazy, crazy, crazy. He’s the least impulsive person on earth. This is the kind of completely insane thing that Spencer himself might do, not the sort of thing Head Detective Carlton Lassiter does. 

He thinks back to the shark case from a year or two ago, when he had been determined to beat Spencer at his own game, when Shawn had encouraged him to follow his guts and trust his instincts. He had been right, he remembers, right that the case was murder, and if he had just stuck to his guns, he could have solved the case before Spencer did. Maybe following crazy instincts could work out? It certainly seemed to work for Spencer. 

Really, what does he think is going to happen here? That Spencer is going to take one look at him and tell him how he got away with the psychic act for so long? It seems unlikely, but Lassiter can’t seem to shake the idea that he needs to see Spencer again in order to reach some kind of closure.

To make things even more complicated, from what Declan said, Shawn is not doing well. So maybe instead of focusing on his weird little obsession, or whatever it is, Lassiter should be thinking about helping a friend in need. Or, maybe not a friend exactly, but a colleague. Except that sounds too cold when he considers that out of all of the people in his life, Shawn and Juliet and Gus are probably the three who know him best. It seems impossible to define his relationship with Spencer when it’s such a tangle of rivalry, frustration, anger, trust (because damn it, he did trust Spencer when it came to solving cases), and, Lassiter will admit begrudgingly only to himself, attraction.

He immediately shuts down the thought that his wanting to see Spencer could be about anything else. This is about him seeking vindication for the long con Spencer ran on the SBPD and nothing to do with any fantasies or daydreams or inexplicably affectionate feelings he might have for Shawn.

Even with all of the reasons he should stay away, he wants to go. He’s lonely and bored and if things stay like this, he’s going to become some sort of cliché alcoholic cop. There’s nothing here in Santa Barbara for him aside from his career, he realizes, and even that seems stagnant and unrewarding right now, depressingly mundane now that he doesn’t have anyone to match wits with, even if it was so often ego-crushing to realize that his wits were somehow lacking in comparison.

Most importantly of all, Shawn Spencer still owes him a goddamned explanation.

He makes two phone calls before leaving town, the first to O’Hara to tell her that he’s taking a vacation. She’s just recently returned from Georgia herself, from training at Glynco, and she’s thrilled to hear that he’s finally taking some time off. He tells her that he’s going down South to tour Civil War battlegrounds and doesn’t say anything about Spencer, because really, this whole thing is too weird.

His second call is to Guster, and if there’s anyone that he should be talking about this to, it’s Burton Guster. To begin with, if Shawn really is in trouble, then he probably would appreciate seeing Gus over anyone else. But he’s reluctant to tell Gus that he’s going to try and find Shawn, because what if Shawn has already moved on from his bartending job and Lassiter can’t find him? He would hate to get Gus’s hopes up for no reason. Or what if he finds Spencer, and he’s in such bad shape that he wouldn’t want Guster to see him? No, he’s not telling Gus yet, not until he actually has something to report. However, he does call to tell Guster that he’s going to be out of town for a couple of weeks. 

As their conversation draws to an end, Guster says “You know, Henry’s birthday was yesterday. I hope that Shawn’s okay, wherever he is.”

“Yeah,” Lassiter says softly, and oh god, is he ready for this?


	6. Chapter 6

Atlanta is hot and humid. Lassiter has only been in town for two hours and he can already feel his shirt sticking to his skin under his suit jacket. He thinks maybe he should take a shower before finding the bar that Declan saw Spencer at, possibly have some dinner as well. He could unpack, plan his itinerary (he wasn’t lying when he told O’Hara that he was touring Civil War sites; turning this into a real vacation is one of the ways he’s justified this trip to himself), turn in early, look for Spencer tomorrow.

No, he’s stalling. He still doesn’t understand what’s compelling him to do this, or know what he’s going to do when (if) he finds Shawn, but he’s come all this way, and he’ll be damned if he chickens out now. 

The bar, a place with the unlikely name of Celebrations!, is not hard to find. Despite the heat, Lassiter’s hands feel clammy when he pushes the door open. 

Spencer is behind the bar. 

Declan was right – he looks like hell. So thin he’s almost gaunt, with shadows under his eyes so deep they look like purple bruises. Even his hair looks sad, though that’s probably the humidity. He’s talking – of course he is, he never shuts up, Lassiter thinks – to a woman behind the bar with him, and he doesn’t see Lassiter right away.

“…and that is why I would choose Patty over Selma every time.”

“Shawn, have you been dipping into the vodka again? You know Janine said she would fire you if she caught you drinking on the job again.”

“Keri, I am stone cold sober, and how dare you insult the Bouvier sisters by assuming I would have to be drunk to have naughty thoughts about them. I’ll have you know that when it comes to animated…”

Lassiter knows the instant that Shawn sees him, because he goes unnaturally still and stops talking for at least five seconds. When he starts again, all the humor has fled his voice.

“Well, well, well. Are you here to shoot me or to arrest me?”

“I haven’t completely decided yet” Lassiter replies honestly. He’s found Shawn and he still doesn’t know what he’s going to do. 

“Let me guess: Declan?”

“The spirits tell you that?” 

Lassiter is momentarily taken aback by the fleeting look of anger on Shawn’s face, but his voice remains cool and dispassionate when he speaks.

“No, Lassie, my common sense told me that. The only thing I don’t know is why you would bother coming at all, except to avenge Jules’s honor or take me in for lying to your precious police department. Why are you here?”

Lassiter looks away, doesn’t reply immediately, but something in his face or body language must give something away, because Spencer’s eyes widen and he breathes out a soft “Oh”. 

“Right now,” Lassiter says quickly, because he’s not at all ready to acknowledge whatever it is that Spencer sees, “I’m here for a drink.”

Shawn pours a scotch on the rocks and slides it across the bar to him. 

“Shawn,” the girl behind the counter says, “Your shift ends in fifteen minutes anyway, so I don’t care if you leave now if you need to talk to your, um, friend.”

“Thanks Keri,” Spencer says as he reaches for a glass in which to pour his own drink. “Take it out of my tips, okay?” 

He comes to the other side of the bar and gestures to a table in the corner. Lassiter follows him and sits down warily, unsure of how to deal with this remote, exhausted-looking version of Spencer.

They don’t speak for a few minutes. Shawn watches him through narrowed eyes while drinking his vodka soda, before finally asking “How’s Jules?”

“She’s fine. It would take a lot more than you to break her, Spencer.”

Spencer nods. “Good.”

Lassiter snorts in derision. “Is that all you have to say for yourself? ‘Good’? You’re a real piece of work.”

“What do you want me to say, Lassiter? Do you want me to confess all my sins to you? Fuck that.”

Which is when Lassiter realizes that Shawn is, in fact, drunk, despite what he told his co-worker, because the kind of hostility he’s displaying is so atypical of his usual demeanor.

“Jesus, Spencer, how much have you had to drink today? And do you eat anymore at all? Used to be I never saw you without a bag of chips or a smoothie, but you look like you haven’t had a solid meal in months.”

Shawn smirks at him, and it’s almost familiar but there’s no humor in it “I had to get ready for swimsuit season, Lassie. I may not live by the beach anymore, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to work a speedo at a moment’s notice.”

Lassiter sighs. This is pointless. Spencer has always been a master of deflection, but his shields are up so high right now, Carlton can’t work out how to get past them. This was a stupid idea and he should never have come. If he actually wanted to help Spencer, he should have sent Guster.

Shawn is still watching him with a focused gaze. “Again, why are you here, Lassie? You don’t even like me.” His voice drops slightly as he looks at Lassiter intently “Or do you?” 

Lassiter can feel a slight blush rising on his cheeks, which he’s certain Shawn can see, but he endeavors to ignore the fact that Spencer can make him feel like a gawky fourteen year old and replies “I’m here because you still owe me an explanation, Spencer. After six years, don’t you think I deserve one?”

Spencer’s eyes widen slightly “Oh come on, I know Jules had to have told you everything. If you really wanted to know more, Gus would break like a dollar store toy if you asked him questions in your Serious Interrogator voice."

“I wouldn’t let them tell me anything, Spencer. I want to hear it from YOU.”

“Well, I don’t feel like talking about it right now, so I’m afraid you’re out of luck, Detective.”

Lassiter runs a hand down in his face in frustration. “You know what? Fine. I thought we had enough respect between each other that we could have this conversation, but apparently I was wrong.”

“Respect? Are you kidding me? You’ve never shown me an ounce of respect!”

“If I didn’t respect what you can do, Spencer, I would never have let you near a crime scene. You’re the one who doesn’t show any respect, with the way you lie to everyone. I don’t know why I expected anything else.” He shakes his head as if to clear away the cobwebs in his mind “I’m at the Sheraton down the street if you change your mind. Room 305."

It’s after midnight when there’s a knock at his door. Lassiter is still awake, lying in the dark and trying to figure out if the earlier conversation between him and Shawn was doomed to failure from the beginning or if there was some point at which he could have turned it around, made Shawn open up to him. 

He goes to the door without turning on the light, taking his bedtime gun, his .357 Derringer with him, and looks out the peephole even though he knows it has to be Spencer. It’s not as if anyone else here knows him. Shawn is standing outside his door with his hands pushed into the pockets of his jeans, his head bent. When he speaks, his voice is loud enough for Lassiter to hear through the door, but hopefully not quite loud enough to wake the people in the nearby rooms.

“Are you going to let me in, or do I just get to stand out here all night while you stare at me through the door? And could you please put your gun away?”

He sighs and sets his gun down on the table, then opens the door, silently ushers Shawn into the room. He can tell from the slightly too-careful way that Spencer is walking that he’s still drunk. Clearly well over the legal limit, his police training chimes in helpfully.

The instant the door closes behind them, Shawn shoves Lassiter against the wall and steps right into this personal space, so close that Lassiter can feel his hot breath against his face. 

“What the hell, Spencer?”

“I know why you’re here, Lassie” and as drunk as he is, Spencer’s voice is steady, but Lassiter can feel the slight tremble in his hand when he puts it against Lassiter’s face and reaches up to kiss him.

_Oh._

Oh god.

This is really happening: Shawn Spencer has him pressed up against a wall and is kissing him. Lassiter’s mouth opens more out of surprise than passion, but Shawn takes advantage and deepens the kiss, and for just a moment Lassiter gives in and kisses him back, just like he never knew that he wanted to, drawing an appreciative moan from Shawn. 

But the taste of tequila is sharp in Shawn’s mouth, and he remembers the barely controlled anger that had been on Shawn’s face earlier, and he forces himself to pull away, because this is a bad idea. 

“Stop it. You’re drunk.”

“So what? Come on Carlton, isn’t this what you came all this way for?”

He can’t really make out Spencer’s expression in the dark room, but the tone of his voice is unmistakably harsh. Also unmistakable is his hand sliding down Lassiter’s chest and coming to rest on his erection.

Amazing how Spencer can make his first name sound like a taunt, and Lassiter’s patience, never particularly enduring around Spencer, finally snaps. He grabs Shawn by the shoulders and twists them around, so that Shawn is the one pressed against the wall, kisses him furiously one more time, then leans deliberately into him, so that Shawn can feel how hard he is, to hiss into his ear.

“When I take you to bed Spencer, you’re not going to be drunk. You’re going to know exactly what we’re doing, and you’re not going to be able to weasel out of it later by saying you were wasted.”

He can’t stop himself from biting down gently on Shawn’s earlobe, making him gasp with surprise, then pulls away.

“Now, get out. I want to get an early start tomorrow and I need some sleep.”

He turns away from Spencer, summoning up all of his willpower to not look back as he makes his way to the bathroom. After a moment, he hears the door open, then close, as Shawn leaves. 

After that comes a cold shower in which he tries, and fails, to not relive the feeling of Shawn pressed up against him, of his warm mouth and groping hands, and then it’s a mostly sleepless night of tossing and turning, trying to figure out where the hell that promise to take Spencer to bed had come from, because he certainly hadn’t intended to say anything of the sort. It was just that Spencer had a way of crawling right under his skin and making him say and do things that he normally didn’t even want to acknowledge. Maybe he should have taken Spencer up on the offer of sex, because he’s probably never going to see him again, and maybe angry drunk sex is the best he should have hoped for from this situation. Spencer will run, because that’s what he does. 

Only, to Lassiter’s everlasting surprise, that’s not what happens. He drags himself out of bed at six o’clock to get started on his sightseeing activities, which he’s trying futilely to dredge up some excitement about. At 6:30 he’s walking through the hotel lobby to the parking garage where his rented car is housed when he hears “Hey, Lassie! Wait up!”

Spencer is standing up from one of the armchairs in the lobby, a backpack slung across one shoulder and a cup from Starbucks in his hand. He looks, if possible, even more exhausted, but he also looks sober and clear-eyed. He bounds up to Lassiter cheerfully, showing no sign of awkwardness over the events of the night before. 

“Where are we going?”

“We?” Lassiter asks, stunned.

“You didn’t think I was going to let you go sightseeing without me, did you?”

“How did you know –"

Spencer nods to the book in Lassiter’s hand, titled _Civil War Sites of Georgia_.

“I love tourist sites,” Shawn says enthusiastically. “We can do your Civil War thing today, but tomorrow can we go to the World of Coca-Cola? I haven’t been yet, and I need to know what Fanta in Zimbabwe tastes like.”

Lassiter just gapes at him. Shawn gives him a concerned look. “Are you okay man?”

“I’m having a little trouble keeping up with your mood swings,” Lassiter admits.

Shawn just pats him on the shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Lassie. Let’s get you some coffee before we hit the road.”

Lassiter’s plan had been to go to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, about twenty miles northwest of his hotel, and then come back into town to visit the Atlanta History Center, which claims the largest Civil War exhibit in the nation. Spencer insists that before they can go anywhere, they have to eat breakfast at The Waffle House.

“You’re in the South! Not eating at The Waffle House would be like going to San Francisco and skipping the seafood.”

Bemused, Lassiter allows Spencer to direct him to a tiny diner, and when Shawn insists on ordering for both of them (“You have to try the hashbrowns, Lassie!”) he doesn’t protest. 

Frankly, he’s too stunned by Spencer’s abrupt personality turnaround to say much of anything.

It’s not until after there is food and coffee in front of them that Shawn says softly “I will tell you what you want to know, Lassie, but not right now, okay? Tomorrow, I promise. Today, can we just be tourists?”

Lassiter shrugs. What’s another day in the grand scheme of things? Particularly when Shawn seems back to his easygoing, fun-loving self.

“So, you don’t have to work today?”

“I don’t like letting things like a schedule tie me down. That job was getting boring – I was there almost two whole weeks! It’s time to move on. I’ll find something else in a few days.”

Lassiter, who is proud of his fifteen plus years with the SBPD, can’t imagine having such a cavalier attitude towards employment, but it’s certainly in keeping with Spencer’s work history before he started Psych. 

Shawn has eaten all of his hashbrowns (they are delicious, Lassiter acknowledges), but is pushing the rest of the food around his plate uneaten. Lassiter watches this uncharacteristic behavior for a few minutes, then says “Shawn, I know Henry’s birth-"

Spencer cuts him off before he can finish the thought. “We’re not talking about that,” he says flatly, and just like that the mask of cheerfulness he’s been wearing all morning is gone. 

He stands up and goes to the restroom, and Lassiter feels like he’s holding his breath and counting the seconds until he returns, half expecting him to escape out of a bathroom window never to be seen (at least by Lassiter) again.

But he does come back, looking composed, if somewhat more reserved than he had been before. “Are you done? I’m ready to see a battlefield.”

Once they’re in the car, Spencer finds a radio station playing eighties music and provides running commentary on every song that comes on (“Did you know that Culture Club originally called themselves Calculus Club? Boy George sucked at math so they had to change the name. Oh, and “Karma Chameleon” is about his fear of coming back in his next life as a lizard.”) and almost sounds normal (well, normal for him), but Lassiter has seen past his carefully applied casualness now and realizes that he’s using the mindless chatter as distraction. He’s just not certain which one of them Spencer is trying to distract.

“I don’t want to shock you Lassie, but I have reason to believe that Madonna was not a virgin when she sang this song.”

Lassiter sighs in exasperation “Isn’t that what the song is about? That her new boyfriend makes her feel, um, virginal again?”

“Ha! I knew it! You’re a secret Madonna fan! I bet you can do all the moves to ‘Vogue’ can’t you? Now, this is very important, Lassie: Sean Penn or Guy Ritchie? Ooooh, or Warren Beatty? I can’t help but feel that her work on the _Dick Tracy_ soundtrack was underrated.”

Thank God, there’s the national park where the battlefield is located. “Oh, look” Lassiter says in an exaggeratedly loud voice “we’re here.”

“Okay, you’re off the hook for now, but later I expect a detailed explanation of not just who was the best romantic partner for Madge, but also which one was the greatest artistic influence. Hint: _Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels_ is a way more awesome movie than _Mystic River_.”

Lassiter just rolls his eyes, which he figures is the only sane response to this asinine conversation, but at the same time he realizes that he’s fighting back a smile and that he really has actually missed Spencer’s inane chatter.

Once inside the park, Spencer snatches his guidebook away and remains mostly quiet while leafing through it, while Lassiter looks at the monuments and reads the informational signs posted. He loses track of Spencer for a while as he gets caught up in reading about the history of the area, until he hears a muffled giggle and turns to see a little girl a few feet away standing behind a couple who appear to be her grandparents, her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide as she watches Shawn doing coin tricks to entertain her. Lassiter feels a weird stutter in the region of his heart as he sees Shawn grin as he pulls a quarter from behind the girl’s ear and hand it to her, then quickly turns away before Shawn and the girl can realize they’ve been spotted. 

In the car on the way back to town, Spencer is so uncharacteristically still and quiet that Lassiter thinks maybe he’s fallen asleep, though he can’t tell for certain since Shawn’s eyes are hidden behind his sunglasses. So he’s startled when Shawn says, apropos of nothing, “I’m a fun drunk, right up until the point when I turn into a mean drunk. I’m sorry if I said or did anything yesterday that was out of line.”

Lassiter risks a quick glance over at him; his head is tipped back against the seat, sunglasses still resolutely in place, limiting Lassiter’s ability to read his expression. Keeping his voice as neutral as possible, he asks “Do you not remember what you said and did yesterday?”

“Oh, I remember.” A tiny smile tugs at the corner of his mouth “By the way, that whole ‘when I take you to bed’ thing is pretty much the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Lassiter isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he opts for what he hopes is a sexily confident silence. 

They next visit the Atlanta History Center as he had planned, for their excellent Civil War collection, but now all he can think about is what Shawn said in the car, wondering once again what the hell he’s doing here with Spencer, and what he wants to happen from here.  
His confusion mounts when they get back to the hotel and Spencer follows him to his room, nattering away the entire time.

“…and what kind of name is Tecumseh anyway? How does that fit in with ‘William’ and ‘Sherman’? Oooh, was he secretly like, a Native American prince or something? That would have been cool.”

Lassiter opens his door and Shawn follows him in, dropping the backpack he’s been carrying all day on the floor, kicking off his shoes, and stretching out on the bed, all before Lassiter even has a chance to register what’s happening. 

“You have cable here, right? There’s no cable at the place I’ve been staying. Do you mind if I hang out for a while and watch TV?” He’s already picked up the remote and started flipping through the channels. “Hey, it’s Sookie! I have no idea what’s happened this season. Have you been keeping up?”

Lassiter eyes the other side of the bed before sitting down in the chair next to the window. Shawn looks amused but doesn’t comment.

“Spencer, I mostly watch the History channel and the news. I have no idea what this even is.”

“Lassie, it’s _True Blood_! You have to watch. See, the hot blonde in the short shorts is Sookie. Her blood is like vampire catnip due to the fact that she’s a fairy.”

“A fairy?”

“Yeah. Like Tinkerbell!”

Lassiter watches as Sookie starts kissing a guy, who tears her shirt off. He blinks. “I…I don’t remember that happening with Tinkerbell.”

“No,” Shawn says, sadly “me neither. It happens to Sookie a lot, though.”

Lassiter leans back in his chair and watches the silly vampire show. About halfway in he turns his head to ask Shawn exactly what the role of the muscular werewolf is in all this and realizes that Shawn is sound asleep.

He considers waking him up, kicking him out. Spencer hasn’t given him any answers yet, and Lassiter doesn’t want him to think that he’s going to be a pushover and let everything between them slide just because of a little sexual attraction. But he takes into account the circles underneath Shawn’s eyes, the lines of exhaustion in his face, the way he had shut down at the barest mention of Henry’s name that morning at breakfast, and decides to let him sleep. Without really intending to, he reaches out and smoothes a hand across Shawn’s shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” he promises. “Tomorrow we’re going to talk.”


	7. Chapter 7

Lassiter wakes up to Spencer tossing and turning on the other side of the bed, mumbling incoherently. Dreaming, Lassiter realizes. Judging from the tension on his face, a nightmare. He reaches over and gently shakes him.

“Shawn, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

“Jules!” Shawn gasps, his eyes popping open. It feels to Lassiter like a fist clenches around his heart at the sound of O’Hara’s name. Shawn’s expression softens as he focuses on the person beside him. “Lassie. Dreaming. It was a dream. Hang on.”

He goes into the bathroom. Lassiter lies back on the bed, puts a hand over his face. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing here. The night before, the decision to sleep in the same bed as Spencer had seemed obvious; there was only one bed in the room and he had already decided to let Spencer stay and maybe get a good night’s sleep. It wasn’t a big deal. He had even congratulated himself, knowing that this way Spencer wouldn’t be able to disappear in the middle of the night without Lassiter knowing about it. But waking up beside him this morning had felt achingly intimate, and hearing O’Hara’s name had sent an unwanted stab of jealousy through him.

There must be something wrong with me, he thinks. Not because he’s attracted to a guy – he had stopped worrying about that when he was in college – but because he’s attracted to a guy who made a career out of undermining and second-guessing him. He can’t deny though that instead of staying on his side of the bed and shaking Shawn awake, what he’d wanted to do was reach out, pull Shawn to him, comfort him.

Shawn comes out of the bathroom. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning and the room is still mostly dark; Lassiter can only see that Shawn is leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest.

“Thanks for waking me up. Some nights…well, most nights, actually, I um, have bad dreams. About that day. Only instead of dad, it’s Gus, or Jules. Or you. And then I wake up and think ‘it was just a dream, everyone’s okay’ before I remember what really happened. Apparently it was Jules’s turn to bleed to death in front of me in my subconscious today.”

No wonder he looks like he hasn’t slept in a month. Lassiter sits up.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks softly.

“Nooo. No, I would really prefer not to. I think I’m going to take a shower, if you don’t mind. Just…could you do me a favor? Later today – because it’s like, two o’clock in the morning in Santa Barbara right now, and I know from experience that she really does not like it when someone wakes her up in the middle of the night just to chat – could you call Jules and make sure she’s okay? I mean, I know she is, but…”

“Yeah. I’ll call her later. Are you sure you don’t want to come back to bed and try and get a little more sleep?”

Shawn laughs hollowly “You know, in my fantasies, you asking me to come back to bed is always in a very different context. No, no more sleep for me tonight. You should sleep some more, though. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

Shawn slips back into the bathroom, and after a minute Lassiter hears the shower come on. He closes his eyes. He’s the worst person possible to be here now; Shawn needs somebody capable of comforting him, someone who possesses tact and warmth. It should be Gus here or, even as upset as she had been with Shawn, Juliet, who has empathy coming out of her pores. Lassiter doesn’t know how to handle the kind of pain Shawn’s in, and he knows he must be a terrible person because a part of his mind has been completely sidetracked by Shawn’s comment about fantasies, and by the fact that all he can think about right now is how Shawn is naked and wet in the next room.

Despite his uneasy thoughts, he does drift back off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the shower. 

When he wakes up again, it’s to the smell of coffee. Shawn has brewed the coffee provided by the hotel in the tiny hotel room coffee pot, and to Lassiter’s sleep-fogged brain it smells amazing.

“Oh good, you’re awake” Spencer says chirpily, sounding like a completely different person than he had earlier. 

Lassiter gets out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom, and when he comes out Shawn hands him a cup of coffee. “Hey, do you mind if I use some of your toothpaste this morning?”

“Don’t you have any of your own?” Lassiter asks grumpily, the caffeine having not worked its magic quite yet (not that he’s always significantly less grumpy after the caffeine takes effect).

Spencer has already gone into the bathroom and Lassiter can hear the water in the sink running. “Yeah, but all I have is the mint flavored kind, and I wanna use your cinnamon flavored kind.”

Lassiter rubs his forehead wearily; it’s too early for this. “Why?” he asks, already regretting the question.

Shawn’s head pops around the corner to look at him and he smiles cheerfully. “Because I plan on kissing you later today, and it’s going to ruin the mood if you have an allergic reaction.”

Lassiter chokes on his coffee, but Shawn has already disappeared back into the bathroom.

When he comes out a few minutes later, all he says is “Bathroom’s all yours!” as he reaches for the remote and starts flipping through the channels. Lassiter gathers up his clothes and quickly retreats for a shower, feeling only as awkward and off-kilter as Spencer can make him feel.

While getting dressed, he gathers his resolve. He is not going to let Spencer sidetrack him with talk of…of kissing or fantasies or anything else. He’s waited six long years for an explanation of how Spencer pulls off the psychic act, and today he’s getting it, come hell or high water. 

When he comes out of the bathroom, Spencer is watching _Spongebob Squarepants_ but the distant look on his face suggests that he’s thinking about something else entirely. 

“We should get some breakfast,” Lassiter says “and then we have to talk. You have to talk. I’m not waiting any longer.”

Spencer bounces out of the chair and nods “Yeah, I know. Wow, my stomach feels all flip-floppy, and I don’t think it’s just because I skipped dinner last night.”

Lassiter is putting his wallet into his pocket when he feels Spencer’s hand on his arm.

“I have a feeling you’re going to be mad at me later, so I’m going to do this now, okay?” And with that, he reaches up to cup the back of Lassiter’s neck and pulls him down for a kiss.

This is as different as imaginable from the kiss two nights before; that had been drunken, aggressive. This is slow and soft, Shawn’s mouth moving gently over his, his fingers sliding through Lassiter’s hair. Lassiter’s resolve over not getting sidetracked vanishes at the first touch of Shawn’s lips; his hands going to Shawn’s waist, pulling him closer, slipping under the hem of his t-shirt to touch the warm skin underneath. Two nights ago aside, it’s been a long time since he’s kissed another man, and it’s shocking to him how thrilling it feels, Shawn’s stubble rasping against his face, the strength of the hand at the back of his head, the way he can feel Shawn getting harder through his jeans as Lassiter tugs him even closer. Lassiter feels like his heart is going to leap out of his chest it’s pounding so hard. He puts one hand on Shawn’s chest, over his heart, and can feel that his is beating just as fast, and somehow that makes everything even better, knowing that Shawn is just as excited and nervous by this as he is. 

After a few minutes, Shawn pulls away, flushed and bright-eyed. “Okay,” he says breathlessly “okay. That was…even the Russian judges give that a 10. We should go get some breakfast now, so that the blood can start flowing back into my brain.”

“Yeah. Yes. Breakfast. Good.” Lassiter realizes he sounds like an idiot, but it’s hard to focus when all he can think about is how much he’d like to tumble Shawn onto the bed and spend the rest of the day there.

They go to a café a block away from the hotel and Shawn leads him to a booth in the corner, sitting so that his back is to the rest of the diners, while Lassiter can see the restaurant at large from his vantage point.

“So!” Shawn says brightly “Are you ready for this?” He sounds confident, but his arms are crossed tightly across his chest protectively. 

“Just get on with it,” Lassiter says sharply. He doesn’t want one of Spencer’s dog-and-pony shows; he just, for once, wants to hear the truth.

“How much do you already know, Lassie?”

“I know your father trained you on police procedure when you were a teenager –"

“Not quite,” Shawn interrupts. “You’re right about Henry training me, but it started when I was about five.”

“Five?” Lassiter asks, astonished. “How do you train a five year old to be a cop?”

“To start with, there was the Hat Game. There are only four hats in this room, which is not nearly enough to impress you with, but I’ll show you anyway.”

Spencer closes his eyes and raises his hand to put his fingertips to his head, which immediately makes Lassiter want to smack at his hand in irritation. As if sensing his annoyance, Shawn opens his eyes and smiles slightly. “Relax, Lassie. It’s just a physical way of focusing my concentration. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

He closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath “Guy in the middle right-hand booth is wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball hat. He’s also wearing a Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt, which means he’s cheating on one sports team with another sports team, right? At least he’s keeping it all in the same state. He’s nervous about something, probably the fact that he’s dying to talk to that pretty barista.”

Lassiter looks at the guy in question, sees that he’s chewing on his straw and shredding the napkin in front of him while trying to stare furtively at the curvy brunette serving coffee a few feet away. He looks back at Shawn, who still has his eyes closed and has been facing the wrong direction to see any of this since they sat down. 

“Go on,” he says carefully.

“Woman at the table beside the front window has on one of those floppy straw sunhats. She’s working on her novel.”

Lassiter can see that she’s tapping away at the keyboard on her laptop, but not how Shawn came to the conclusion that she’s writing a book. “What makes you think that?”

“The three books she has on the table beside her. They’re all guides to writing romance novels. I wonder if she’s written any dirty parts she would let us read.”

“How do you know that? The spines are facing the wrong direction.”

“I saw them when we walked past the window outside. On the opposite side of the room, there’s a guy in a trucker’s hat that has one of those naked woman silhouettes on it, the kind you usually see on eighteen-wheeler mud flaps. It is super classy. The pretty barista was so grossed out by it and him that she could barely stand to look at him when he ordered his coffee. Actually, every woman in the room is doing her best to avoid looking at him, so the only action I see in his future is with his naked lady hat.”

“Spencer!”

“Sorry,” Shawn says, not looking the least bit repentant. “Finally, there’s the barista herself, wearing a cap with the café logo on it. Her shoes are too tight and her feet are killing her. I can tell by the way she’s walking.”

He opens his eyes and adds “Incidentally, it’s not a hat, but the woman sitting at the table closest to the door is carrying concealed. She’s a cop, probably a detective, judging from her suit and shoes.”

Now that he knows it’s there, Lassiter can see the faint outline of the holster under the woman’s jacket. 

“Okay,” he says slowly “Your back has been to the room all this time. I don’t see any reflective surfaces where you could see what’s going on behind you. When did you notice all of this?”

“When we walked in, the time it took us to get from the front door to the booth.”

“That couldn’t have taken more than twenty seconds!”

“Yeah,” Shawn smiles a little uneasily “Scary, huh? I have an eidetic memory. Basically, I remember nearly everything I see. What Henry did was train me to pay attention to all of it and interpret it into facts.”

“Since you were five?”

Spencer shrugged. “Some kids play hide-and-go-seek, I…well, I played hide-and-go-seek too, but it was like a scary military version where dad got irritated if he found me too easily. Unlike the rest of the five year olds, I also played games invented by my dad to heighten my observational skills, along with lessons on things like reading body language.”

“So, walk me through how this leads to Psych.”

“It was your fault, Lassie! You tried to arrest me! All I wanted was the reward money. But with you threatening to put me in a holding cell because you didn’t believe me when I told you the truth, I had to improvise. Officer Allen had all this woo-woo stuff, which is what gave me the idea to go with psychic. Everything just sort of snowballed from there.”

“ _For six years?_ Six. Fucking. Years. That’s the part I don’t understand, Spencer. Six years of lying to me, and O’Hara, and Vick. Wait, Vick doesn’t know, does she?”

“No. Or, well, I’ve certainly never told her. I think she suspects the truth but maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where I’m concerned. One that has nothing to do with how I like to sleep with guys.”

“And O’Hara? How do you justify getting into a relationship with her, sleeping with her, when you were lying to her the entire time?”

Spencer looks down at the table. “I can’t,” he says softly “I can’t justify it. By the time I started dating Jules, it felt like it was too late to tell her the truth. I was afraid it would bring everything crashing down”. 

He rubs a hand across his eyes “Even I don’t know what I was thinking during those last few months. I had an engagement ring for her, did you know that? What kind of idiot was I, thinking about marriage when I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth? It was like…I had the perfect girl, and the perfect job, where I got to show my dad all the time how smart I was and how good I could be, and it was like I was on track to finally being the son he wanted me to be, and marrying Jules would have been a part of achieving that. I spent so long rebelling against him that I don’t even know when it was that I started trying to get him to approve of me.”

“I could arrest you,” Lassiter says quietly. “I probably should. You defrauded my department. You insulted and belittled me on what felt like a weekly, if not daily basis.”

“If you really feel that way, then why are you even here?” Shawn asks, looking up at him. “You knew before you came that the psychic thing was a lie, and not because of anything Jules or Gus or anyone else told you, but because you’ve always known. One of the things I like best about you, Lassiter, is your skepticism. You have always called me on my bullshit. So I’m going to return the favor and call you on yours: you know that I was good at what I did, and that I closed cases that might otherwise still be open. Yeah, it was all based on a lie, but the end result is the same. If this were as simple as you just being pissed off about the lying, you would have already arrested me or given it up as a lost cause, but instead of doing either of those things, you’re here having it out with me now. So don’t pretend that you haven’t already made up your mind about this.”

Lassiter stands up abruptly. “I’m going for a walk. I need to clear my head.”

“Lassie –"

“Don’t, okay Spencer? Give me some time to wrap my head around all this.” Lassiter hesitates, then adds “And for god’s sake, don’t run off. I really will arrest you if you disappear on me.”


	8. Chapter 8

There’s a park not far from his hotel where Lassiter figures he can walk aimlessly for a while, and so he goes, and walks, and thinks. 

Thinks about six years of lies versus six years worth of cases closed and criminals caught. Thinks about how Henry Spencer simultaneously managed to raise a son who is both the most brilliant detective Lassiter’s ever met while also being one of the most screwed-up people he’s ever known. Thinks about whether or not his own ego can withstand the acknowledgement that Spencer really is just that good. 

He thinks too about Shawn covered in Henry’s blood, shocked and silent on the beach, about him waking up from nightmares every day and running off to the other side of the country to try and escape his memories. He thinks about all of Spencer’s worst qualities; that he’s deceptive and manipulative and reckless, and then about all of his best qualities, that he’s loyal and optimistic and brave (sometimes to the point of idiocy), and, strangely enough, as dedicated to justice as Lassiter is himself.

He thinks about the kiss in the hotel room that morning.

He checks his watch to see if it’s still too early to call Santa Barbara, and seeing that it’s after eleven o’clock on the East Coast decides that it’s safe to call O’Hara.

“Carlton! Is everything all right? Are you still on vacation?”

“Everything’s fine, O’Hara,” he says, trying very hard to sound like a normal guy on vacation and not like someone who made out with his ex-partner’s ex-boyfriend earlier that day.

“Are you sure? You sound strange.”

“I’m fine. Maybe I’m just…a little homesick.”

“Are you having fun? Have you done any sightseeing?”

“I visited a battlefield yesterday, and went to a museum with some really fantastic pieces. How are you? How’s work?”

“It’s been amazing, actually. Do you remember the Eric Jasper case?”

“Murdered his wife, then after the conviction escaped from a prison detail. I remember.”

“We caught him last night.” She goes on to tell him the details of the case, the role she played in apprehending the fugitive. Lassiter can feel himself relaxing a little listening to her chatty tone discussing the comforting details of shop talk.

“See O’Hara? I told you that you would be a great Marshal.”

“I really like it here. I think I’ve even made some friends. I miss you though; some of the guys here…they make me really appreciate what we had.”

“If you want me to come kick anyone’s ass, just let me know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she laughs.

He hesitates, then says “O’Hara, can I ask you a personal question? A really bizarre personal question that I’m not prepared to have a follow-up conversation about at this time?”

“Well…sure Carlton,” she replies, sounding startled “Go ahead”.

“If Spencer had told you before you started dating him that he had been faking the whole psychic thing, would you still have gotten involved with him?”

There is a long silence before Juliet says “I don’t know. Maybe. If you want to know the truth, probably. If I had known beforehand, it would have been a lot easier to forgive than it was after finding out after we had been together for all those months. And, well, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I was _smitten_ , you know? I liked him so much. In the end, I just couldn’t trust him, but I still care about him. I hope that wherever he is, he’s doing well. I worry about him. Carlton, what on earth is this about?”

“I’m sorry O’Hara, I can’t talk about it right now. I promise I’ll tell you someday. I should let you go, I know you have work. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, sounding reluctant to let him go “Take care of yourself, Carlton.”

He puts his phone away and starts walking back in the direction of the café where he left Shawn, not sure whether or not he expects him to still be there. It’s only been about an hour since he left, but Spencer is not exactly known for his patience or his ability to stay in one place. So he’s almost surprised when he reaches the café and finds Shawn sitting on a bench out front, drinking a smoothie.

Lassiter sits down beside him, and for a few long minutes neither of them speaks, until Lassiter finally says “I called O’Hara. She’s fine.”

“Thank you for doing that. Um, does she know that you’re with me?”

“No. I don’t like keeping secrets from her, but…no.”

Shawn nods and goes back to drinking his smoothie before tentatively saying “Lassie? I never…I don’t want you to think of me as belittling you. That’s not what it was. It was more like I was that kid who pulls on the pigtails of the girl he likes to try and get her to pay attention to me.” He pauses, then adds “And now I’m picturing you with pigtails. Don’t ever grow pigtails, Lassie. It’s not a good look for you.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Lassiter says, but he can’t keep the fondness out of his voice.

“Agree to disagree,” Shawn mutters with a little smile, before returning his attention to his smoothie. 

“Shawn? I don’t think we’re finished having that conversation. There are still some things we have to clear up. But not today. Do you still want to go to the Coca-Cola thing?”

“Yeah,” Shawn says, sounding surprised at the suggestion. “I want to find something in the gift shop there to send to Gus.”

So they go to the World of Coca-Cola and taste soda from around the world and Shawn buys a postcard and a stuffed polar bear to send to Gus. Lassiter can’t help but notice that Shawn stays close to him throughout the afternoon, casually touching him on the arm or shoulder to the degree where it ceases to seem casual and feels more like Shawn is afraid he might suddenly disappear. Which is absurd, because Spencer is the one who is prone to running off without a moment’s notice. 

Afterwards, they go back to the hotel room. It’s still only mid-afternoon, but Lassiter feels like he’s been through some sort of grueling emotional marathon and is thinking about taking a rare afternoon nap. He IS on vacation after all. Shawn, meanwhile, is eyeing his backpack unhappily “I should go do some laundry. Everything I own is ripe.”

“That’s everything you own?”

“I travel around the country on a motorcycle, Lassie. Packing light is kind of a necessity. I think there’s a Laundromat a couple of blocks away.”

“I’m sure the hotel has a laundry service.”

“Nah, they’ll charge an arm and a leg. I’ll just go take care of it. You…you’ll be here when I get back, right?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Why would you ask that?”

Shawn starts fiddling with his backpack, doesn’t meet his eyes “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bail. You might have noticed, Lassie, I’m kind of a mess these days. Mood swings, nightmares, insomnia, all on top of the rubble of the last six years. And…you were really mad this morning. I’m not sure why you would want to stick around.”

Lassiter stares at him disbelievingly, mostly because he’s never imagined that Shawn Spencer could be this vulnerable. Then he impulsively reaches over and kisses him hard on the mouth. He can feel Shawn start with surprise, then smile against his lips. 

“Oh,” he says when Lassiter pulls away “Okay. You’ll be here. Cool. I’m just going to go because I’m babbling now, and yeah…I’ll be back in a few hours. You should take a nap, or watch some TV, or…you’re really good at that, you know. I’m just gonna …” he gestures wildly to the door before hastily exiting. 

Lassiter can’t help but feel a little pleased with himself, since he so rarely is able to actually unbalance Spencer. He stretches out on the bed and dozes off for half an hour, wakes up feeling disoriented and cranky. Normally when feeling like this he would go to the shooting range to blow off some steam but since that isn’t an option he goes down to the pool and swims laps until his head feels clear again. Shawn still hasn’t returned when he comes back to the room, so he starts looking through his travel guide, trying to decide if he wants to go north to Lookout Mountain or south to Andersonsville. He’s just about decided on north when there’s a knock on the door. 

“I brought food!” Shawn says, as Lassiter opens the door. He’s carrying a bag of what smells like Chinese food. As they’re eating, Lassiter realizes that there’s something that’s been nagging at him all day. 

“You really had an engagement ring for O’Hara?”

Spencer looks embarrassed. “Yeah. Not that I ever gave it to her. I don’t even know why I had it. It’s not as if Jules even wanted that kind of commitment yet. It just seemed like the grown-up thing to do, for some reason, but what I was ignoring was that I suck at being a grown-up. Gus completely freaked out when he found it.”

“I can imagine.”

“I don’t know what I was doing with Jules,” Shawn muses quietly. “I know I loved her – I mean, who wouldn’t love Jules? She’s amazing. But once we were together, it was like…I knew it wasn’t right. Sometimes I think I tried to subconsciously sabotage the whole thing. I spent more time with Gus than I did with her, and then there was that whole thing with her dad, which she would have been totally justified in dumping me over.”

“Yes,” Lassiter agrees, thinking back to how angry Juliet had been over having her feelings about her relationship with her father disregarded “she is much too forgiving.”

“It was like a part of me was trying to push her hard enough that she would break up with me, but at the same time I was terrified that she would find out that I wasn’t really psychic and dump me. I guess I didn’t know what I wanted. Or, I wanted to want that relationship, but once I had it, I realized that I didn’t really want it after all. You know?”

“You might have lost me there,” Lassiter admits drily, making Shawn smile a little. He does know though, because he had watched that relationship from the sidelines and wondered what the hell Shawn was doing.

Speaking of O’Hara, he suddenly realizes that he hasn’t told Spencer about her new job. Shawn is surprised and happy for her, but there’s something speculative in his eyes as he looks at Lassiter.

“So, where does that leave you? Do you have a new partner yet?”

“Not yet. I asked Vick to hold off on that for a while.”

“I’m sure there’s another beautiful blonde junior detective out there who needs training,” Shawn says with a leer.

“Spencer!”

“What? I knew your last two partners, Lassie. You do seem to get paired with a particular type. Not that you should complain about that.”

“That was just a coincidence,” Lassiter grumbles, though it’s true that he’s found that he prefers female partners. They’re less likely to turn every disagreement or challenge into a pissing match, a fault he knows he’s prone to himself.

Thinking about partners leads him to thinking about Shawn’s partner, and he feels a little pang of guilt at realizing that he’s spent almost two days with Shawn without suggesting that he call Guster, and that’s unforgiveable knowing as he does how worried Gus has been about his best friend. 

“How do you know Gus is worried?” Shawn asks when he voices this thought “Oh my god Lassie, have you been hanging out with Gus?”

Shawn looks shocked, like he never dreamed that Gus and Lassiter might spend time together without him around.

“Someone has to keep him company!” Lassiter said defensively. 

“So, he doesn’t have a girlfriend yet?"

Lassiter shakes his head “No. Why, were you hoping he would meet someone without you around to distract him?”

“No, I was hoping he wouldn’t. He can’t possibly pick out a girlfriend on his own. You’ve seen some of the women he’s dated. He’s like a crazy woman magnet! Show me a woman who’s in a cult, or a mental hospital, or is some sort of thrill-seeking daredevil, or is just flat-out nuts, and THAT will be the woman that Burton Guster is attracted to. He needs a keeper.”

Lassiter pushes his phone towards Shawn. “Call him. Seeing the two of you be apart for this long is actually painful.”

Shawn hesitantly picks up the phone and starts looking through Lassiter’s contact list. “Is his number even in here? I don’t see it under “Guster” or “Burton”.”

“Oh. Uh, it’s under Idiot #2.”

Shawn grins “Does that make me Idiot #1? I knew you liked me best!”

Lassiter can’t help but be amused, but says “Just call him, Spencer.”

Looking a little nervous, Shawn presses the call button and puts the phone to his ear. 

“Gus? Yeah, it’s me buddy!...Are you crying? Don’t cry, Gus! I’m fine, I’m good! Everything is good!” he pauses “Why am I calling from Lassiter’s phone? Well, um, funny story, Lassie’s here with me in Atlanta.” There’s another pause, then he hands the phone over to Lassiter. “He wants to talk to you for a minute.”

“LASSITER, WHAT THE HELL? What are you doing there? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Feeling guilty, Lassiter replies “I’m sorry, Guster. I didn’t even know if I would find him. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Okay, but what are you doing? Why are you… oh my gosh. Are you…is Han Solo finally making a move on Luke Skywalker?”

“Maybe,” Lassiter replies, turning away from Shawn because he can feel himself starting to blush. Stupid fair complexion. “I don’t really know. Here, I’m giving the phone back to Spencer. You two talk, or mind meld, or whatever it is you do.”

He hands the phone back to Shawn, then disappears into the bathroom to take a shower and give the Dynamic Duo a chance to talk in private. 

When he comes out later, Spencer appears to be done with his conversation, but is staring at Lassiter’s phone thoughtfully. 

“Everything all right?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Gus thinks the Jeremy Renner Bourne movie was better than any of the Matt Damon ones, can you believe that? It’s like he loses touch with reality if I’m not around.” 

As he speaks, Shawn sets the phone down on the table and stands up, advancing slowly on Lassiter, who feels suddenly apprehensive.

“Spencer? What are you doing?”

Shawn is right in front of him now, a strange, hungry expression on his face, reaching out to brush a hand across the front of Lassiter’s pajama top, making Lassiter’s breath catch in his throat. 

“You saved my voicemail, Lassie. The one I left as I was leaving town.”

Lassiter feels a hot flush of embarrassment at having been caught hanging on to Shawn’s voicemail like some kind of lovestruck teenager, but the look in Shawn’s changeable hazel eyes suggests that he’s not interested in teasing Lassiter right now.

“Yeah. I did.”

“Why?”

“I – I don’t know. I guess I didn’t know if I would see you-”

He’s cut off abruptly as Shawn pulls him forward into a kiss, his tongue licking greedily into Lassiter’s mouth as his hands fist into the soft cotton. Lassiter moans at the sudden invasion, feeling like every nerve in his body has lit up in response to Spencer’s taste and touch. Shawn is pulling at his pajama top, unbuttoning it, then shoving it off to the floor. His mouth moves to suck hard at Lassiter’s neck at the same time as he slides a thumb across a nipple. Lassiter makes a choked noise and grabs for Shawn’s hips, pulling him even closer, close enough that he can grind into him and feel how hard he is. How hard they both are. Shawn breaks the kiss and whispers “I’m not drunk tonight, Lassie. Not even a little bit.”

“No,” Lassiter agrees breathlessly, “you’re not.”

And then Shawn is pushing him onto the bed and kissing him again, disentangling himself briefly to get up and take something out of his backpack, which Lassiter’s lust-fogged brain recognizes a few seconds later as a box of condoms. Shawn must see something in his expression that worries him, because he asks softly “Is this okay?” as he sets the box on the nightstand. 

Lassiter blinks up at him, then reaches forward to grab him by the belt loops on his jeans. “Come. Here.”

“I don’t think coming is going to be a problem,” he hears Shawn say as he tugs him back onto the bed, rolling them over so that he has Shawn pinned down, so that he finally has him right where he wants him.


	9. Chapter 9

Lassiter wakes up to the unfamiliar feeling of someone in bed beside him.

“Hold still,” Shawn orders, kissing his elbow. It tickles a little. 

“Spencer, what are you doing?”

“I have a list that I’ve been compiling for years you know, of places on you that I want to kiss.”

“You’re telling me that all this time, you’ve been harboring a secret lust for my elbows?”

“Not just your elbows, Lassie” Shawn assures him, moving up to suck on an earlobe, which feels rather nice and has Lassiter reaching up to pull him closer. Shawn responds by stopping what he’s doing and pinning Lassiter’s wrists loosely to the bed.

“Didn’t I tell you not to move?” he asks severely. This is something Lassiter had learned the night before, that Shawn is unexpectedly bossy in bed. He surprises himself by finding it kind of fantastically fucking hot. The little smile playing around the corner of Shawn’s mouth seems to indicate that he knows exactly how much Lassiter likes this particular game. 

Shawn goes back to sucking on his ear, stopping only to whisper “The buzz cut drove me crazy, Lassie. I wanted to nibble on your ears every day for months, until your hair grew out again.” 

He kisses the curve of Lassiter’s jaw, the tip of his chin, the hollow of his throat.  
“Also crazymaking? When you leave off your tie and I can see this little V of skin right here.” He licks the area in question. 

“Shawn!” Lassiter groans in frustration.

“Shhhh, I’m not done yet.”

For someone who so often seems to have the attention span of a sugar-fueled eight year old with ADD, Shawn is remarkably focused on the matter at hand, kissing and licking his way slowly down Lassiter’s chest until he reaches his belly, where he stops and blows a raspberry, before looking up with a smile. 

“Now, what should I do next?” he muses, with just the briefest glance down to the part of Lassiter most eager for his attention.

“I have a few suggestions,” Lassiter offers hopefully.

Shawn’s smile widens. “I’m sure you do.”

But instead of continuing on his downward trajectory as Lassiter had been hoping, Shawn shifts his attention to the wrists he still has pinned down, the hands lying palm up on the rumpled white sheets.

“Do you remember the night I read your palm?”

Lassiter swallows, thinking of just how often he’s jerked off to that particular memory.

“Yeah. I remember.”

Shawn’s thumb is stroking across his wrist now. “You were so hard for me that night, Lassie. I wanted you so much. That perp had sucky timing, interrupting us when he did.”

“Oh?” Lassiter’s voice sounds shaky, even to his own ears. “What would you have done if we hadn’t been interrupted?”

Shawn releases his wrists and swipes his thumb across the head of Lassiter’s cock, making him gasp with pleasure. “I’ll show you,” he promises, and after that there’s no more talking for a while.

The next time Lassiter wakes up, several hours later, it’s to Shawn having a nightmare again. He can tell by the way Shawn is mumbling in his sleep and shifting restlessly. As he had the previous morning, Lassiter reaches out to shake Shawn awake. Shawn wakes up slowly this time, and without saying anything gets out of bed, picks his boxers up off the floor, and goes into the bathroom. 

Lassiter waits what feels like a very long time for Shawn to come back out, or for the tell-tale sound of the shower to start, or for any sign at all that Shawn is fine, but there’s nothing. Finally, he gets up, pulls on his pajama pants, and goes to the bathroom door. 

“Shawn? Are you okay?”

No answer. Lassiter feels his chest tightening with something like panic.

“Shawn, if you don’t answer me, I’m coming in there. Spencer?”

Still no answer. Lassiter twists the doorknob, grateful to realize that it’s not locked.

“Huh. I thought I was the one in this relationship with boundary issues.” Lassiter thinks the joke might be more convincing if Shawn’s voice weren’t shaking.

“Spencer, what the hell?”

Shawn is sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall, his head resting on his knees. He takes a couple of deep breaths before raising his head, and sounds hoarse when he speaks again.

“Sorry. Another nightmare, followed by a little bitty panic attack. I can’t…the thing about an eidetic memory, Lassie, is that I can’t forget anything. I remember everything about that day on the beach. I know exactly what the blood pattern on my dad’s shirt looked like, how big the pool of blood surrounding him was, the look in his eyes as he died. I can tell you which shoes Jules was wearing and the color of the tie you had on. I remember every fucking detail of what Jerry Carp looked like that morning.” He looks up at Lassiter briefly “How is Uncle Jerry, by the way?”

“He’s in prison. He’s never getting released. He’ll die there, Shawn.”

Shawn laughs hollowly. “I never thought I was capable of killing anyone, but I could have killed him that morning. I thought about it, you know. I could have had your gun or Jules’s in my hands before either of you knew what happened. I’m a really good shot, Lassiter.”

“And then you would have been the one in prison instead of Carp. You’re not a killer, Shawn. You would have hated yourself if you had done that.” 

Lassiter is speaking softly, moving a little closer to where Shawn is on the floor. He feels wary, like he’s dealing with a frightened animal, unsure of how Shawn is going to react at any moment.

Shawn’s head thumps against the wall behind him. “Just…god, why can’t I forget? I’ve tried filling my head with different memories, and I’ve tried blotting it out. Drinking doesn’t work, sex doesn’t work, and even on the days when I manage to not think about it, I end up having nightmares where I get to relive it all over again. Why won’t anything work, Lassie?”

“I don’t know.” Lassiter is close enough to touch Shawn now, and after hesitating for a moment, he reaches down to brush his fingers across the top of Shawn’s head. “It’s going to take time.”

“When I was fifteen I read and memorized the entire California Penal Code so that I could pass the detective’s exam. It’s all still here” he says, tapping the side of his head “Time doesn’t work for my memory the way it does for other people.”

Lassiter sinks down onto the floor beside Shawn, not touching him now except to sit shoulder-to-shoulder. “What have you done in the past when you wanted to forget something?”

“It’s hard to explain. When I was a kid, my mom took me to a therapist who taught me how to box old memories away. I’ve been trying, but it just hasn’t been working the way it should. You..” Shawn hesitates, his voice turning suddenly shy “You’re the first thing that’s been able to keep me distracted for months. I’m still having the nightmares, but you keep me occupied when I’m awake.”

Lassiter isn’t sure how he feels about being labeled a distraction, but at the same time he’s pleased at the idea that he’s helping Shawn in some way. 

“So, distract me” Shawn says “You still have questions. Ask me something.”

This is not what Lassiter expected, but he’ll take it. However, what comes out of his mouth is not really what he intended to ask.

“If you knew years ago that I was, uh, attracted to you, and if you felt the same way, then why didn’t you do anything about it?”

Shawn turns to him, grinning “Lassie, that is not what I expected you to ask. It is, however, very distracting, so kudos. Well, I tried for years, you know. I mean, I don’t just grope every guy I meet, but you seemed strangely resistant to my charms. Look, I knew there was something there from the first time you threw me up against a wall, but you’re a cop, and I grew up around cops, and I know they’re not necessarily the most tolerant or open-minded group of people. After a few years, I decided that if anything were ever going to happen between us, it would have to be because you came to me.” Shawn bumps his shoulder companionably “And look at that, I was right.”

“I didn’t know,” Lassiter admits, looking down at his hands “I mean, not really. You drove me crazy.”

“Yeah,” Shawn says wistfully “we had fun, didn’t we?”

Lassiter lightly punches him in the arm. “Speak for yourself,” he says, but there’s no heat in his tone. 

“Now it’s my turn for a question: When do you have to go back to Santa Barbara?”

“I asked for two weeks off, so I still have another week and a half.”

Shawn turns to look at him, his eyes wide with shock “You asked for two weeks off to come find me? Lassie, I’ve known you for six years, and I’ve never seen you take off for anything longer than a three day weekend. And even then, Jules had to tell you to stop calling her!”

“I had to make sure she was filing the paperwork properly! One little mistake and a miscreant could go free!” He can feel Shawn laughing at him, so he gets back to the subject at hand. “Anyway, I didn’t know if I would find you right away, and Chief Vick was on my ass to take some time – ” He’s cut off by Shawn, who pulls him in for a long kiss. 

Lassiter isn’t about to argue – this is much more fun than talking – but he is a little surprised. When Shawn pulls away, he asks “What brought that on?”

“You took two weeks off for me. I think you like me, Lassie.”

Lassiter stands up and offers Shawn a hand to pull him up as well; the tile floor is starting to feel uncomfortable. “I think the fact that I like you should be pretty obvious by now,” he says drily. 

Shawn doesn’t let go of his hand after he stands up; instead he tugs on it and leads Lassiter back to the bedroom. “Come on, let’s order in room service for breakfast and stay in bed all day. I’m not done with you yet.”

In theory it’s a plan he’s all in favor of, but in the end, Lassiter can’t bring himself to spend twenty dollars on scrambled eggs, so he throws on some clothes and goes down to the coffee shop in the hotel lobby for muffins and a smoothie for Shawn. When he finds himself buying pineapple Danish because he knows how happy it will make Spencer, he wonders if this is what O’Hara meant by “smitten”.

They do end up spending the morning in bed, eating breakfast and watching a Val Kilmer movie that Spencer unearths on cable (“You’ll love it, Lassie. Val is gay, macho, shoots things, and kisses Robert Downey Jr. It’s like the best of every possible world”). Afterwards, Lassiter holds Shawn down and sucks him off slowly, while Shawn arches and begs underneath him. 

Later, as he's idly drawing patterns through Lassiter's chest hair with the tip of his finger, Shawn says casually “Because you and my dad are both cops, and both tend towards a certain amount of…grumpiness, I used to worry that my attraction to you was some sort of weird Oedipal thing.”

Lassiter frowns. “An Oedipal attraction would mean that you want to sleep with your mother, not your father.”

Shawn shrugs lazily. “I’ve heard it both ways."

“I can’t believe you’re having this conversation with me while we’re both naked.”

Shawn rolls over, pinning Lassiter to the bed and laying a series of kisses down his throat. “I stopped worrying about the Oedipal thing a long time ago.”

“Oh?” Lassiter squeaks out, already losing a certain amount of interest in the conversation.

“You and my dad have a few surface similarities – the badge, the scowl, the interest in manly hobbies like fishing and guns – but underneath that you’re nothing like him. You’re WEIRD, Lassie, with your Civil War reenactments, and your monocle, and your crazy squirrel vendetta and your enemies list and your freaky snow globe phobia.” 

Underneath him, Lassiter tenses, but Shawn just grins down at him. “I like it. I like it A LOT. I’ve never been good with normal.”

“I don’t think you and normal are even on the same planet,” Lassiter grumbles, but he can’t deny the warm glow he feels inside at Shawn’s admission that he likes him just the way he is. Lassiter had once told Marlowe that inside his chest was a festival of lights, and sure he’d been fairly drunk at the time, but here, with Shawn on top of him nuzzling into his throat, it feels true, like there’s not just a festival of lights inside him, but like all the lights are dancing.


	10. Chapter 10

Carlton Lassiter knows that happiness doesn’t last, but he had been hoping for more than 24 hours of it with Shawn. Which is why, when the first cracks appear, he’s thrown by it.

“I was thinking we could go up to Lookout Mountain,” he says to Shawn that afternoon. “There’s a national park with a battlefield there, and they’re having artillery demonstrations tomorrow. There’s also a lot of other touristy crap, so if you’re not interested in more Civil War history, there will be other stuff to do.” He stops talking at the way Spencer is looking at him, or more specifically, the way Spencer suddenly isn’t looking at him.

“That’s up near Tennessee, right?”

“Yeah, right at the border between the states. Why?”

“It’s just – we haven’t talked about your vacation plans, Lassie. Are you flying out of Atlanta, or are you traveling up the coast and flying out of a different state?”

Puzzled and a little irritated, Lassiter replies “Flying out of Atlanta. Why does it matter?”

“Oh!” Shawn says, sounding relieved. “That’s good. It’s just, my bike is here. I can leave it a couple of days, but if you were planning on leaving the state and not returning, I…well.”

He shuts up. Lassiter stares at him. He had, in all honesty, completely forgotten about Shawn’s motorcycle, and it feels like a bucket of cold water over his head to realize that Spencer had been about to say that if Lassiter wasn’t coming back through Atlanta, then Shawn wouldn’t go with him.

“But you are coming back, so no worries! We need to stop and get some road trip food. I’m craving Cool Ranch Doritos and Skittles! Probably not at the same time, but maybe I’ll discover a new taste sensation.” Spencer is babbling now, probably from nervousness. 

“No Doritos in the car,” Lassiter says flatly, automatically responding to Spencer’s nonsense. “I won’t get my deposit back if the car smells like Cool Ranch.” 

“But Lassie, Doritos are an imperative part of the road trip experience!”

It’s so easy to fall into their usual pattern and snark something in reply, but Lassiter is barely even aware of their banter. This _thing_ , affair, whatever it is, has a time limit, and Shawn has already thought about that, is apparently one step ahead of Lassiter yet again. In a week and a half, Lassiter is going to get on a plane and go back to Santa Barbara, and Shawn is going to get on his motorcycle and go somewhere else. 

If that’s the way it’s going to be, then fine, Lassiter reasons to himself. He can enjoy a fling, right? There was no way this was going to last, so why not just have fun with it for the few days that it does? This way, there’s no ugly break-up, no waking up to the sick realization that he’s tried everything he knows to do and still failed, the way he had with Victoria and Marlowe. 

“Lassie?” Shawn asks worriedly “Where’d you go?”

Lassiter shakes his head, willing himself to not say or do anything that will reveal to Spencer how stricken he is by the realization that two weeks from now, he’s not going to have Shawn in his life anymore. Again. 

“I’m right here,” he says firmly. “If we leave now, we can get there before it gets dark.”

It’s silly how sad he feels checking out of the hotel; we’ll always have Room 305, he thinks bitterly. Spencer can obviously tell something is wrong – he is, after all, a genius at reading body language and facial expressions – but he either doesn’t know why Lassiter’s upset or he’s purposely ignoring it. He cranks up the radio and rolls down his window, his sunglasses hiding his expression enough that Lassiter has no idea what he’s thinking or feeling. It’s strange, how Shawn can go from being the most energetic, touchy-feely, loquacious person Lassiter’s ever met to this remote stranger. If he had ever thought about it, he would have assumed that knowing the truth about the psychic fraud, to say nothing of going to bed with Spencer, would have made him less of a mystery, but instead it’s like he just keeps uncovering layers, only to find that there are even more layers underneath.

From the passenger seat, there is a very unmysterious snore. 

Or maybe instead of layers that hide what he’s really feeling, he’s just tired from months of restless sleep and a night and half a day of marathon sex. Lassiter supposes that could be true too.

Shawn napping gives Lassiter the opportunity to think about why the idea that Spencer isn’t going to come back to Santa Barbara with him is so disconcerting. The last few months, have, quite frankly, sucked. Shawn not being around is just a part of that; Henry’s death seemed to set off a chain reaction of badness, from Shawn leaving to the doomed relationship with Marlowe, to losing O’Hara as a partner.

Shawn coming home wouldn’t fix any of those things, and would in fact lead to a whole new series of difficulties, but the thought of him not being there makes Lassiter’s heart ache in a way that he didn’t know he was capable of anymore. He’s always prided himself on being a stoic loner figure like Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name or Dirty Harry, but over the last six years he’s gotten accustomed to the quirky, lively personalities surrounding him, and at the forefront of that is Shawn. The fact is, he’s lonely, and when he looks back at the past months after Shawn left, all he can see is an endless slog of gray, meaningless days. 

The thought of going back to that is terrifying. 

Two hours later, Spencer finally stirs. “Are we there yet?” he asks sleepily.

“Almost. I was thinking we might get some dinner before finding a hotel.”

Spencer yawns “Whatever you want, Lassie.”

What Lassiter wants is to shake the nonchalance out of Spencer and find out if any of this means anything at all to him, but he knows from experience that directly confronting Shawn about something he doesn’t want to talk about is useless, so he decides to settle for getting an answer to a different kind of question for now.

He waits until they’re halfway through dinner at a steakhouse he finds off the highway before asking something that’s been plaguing him for months.

“Where did you learn how to fool a lie detector?” Lassiter tries to make his question sound casual, but there’s no denying both his curiosity and the little flare of anger in his chest when he recalls the incident, Spencer being as smug as only he can be, looking him right in the eye and lying.

Shawn answers without hesitation. “Henry. He taught me how to do that when I was, I dunno, thirteen.” 

“Why in the name of sweet justice would he do that?” Lassiter asks, astounded.

Shawn shrugs casually, but Lassiter can see how his shoulders tense up as he talks about Henry. 

“He said I might need to know how to do it one day if I ever went undercover or something. He had an entire career mapped out for me, you know. Strangely enough, fake psychic detective was not part of his plan. I can’t deny though that many of his lessons came in handy over the years.”

“Like what?”

Shawn smiles slightly, but doesn’t look at Lassiter when he replies, keeping his eyes focused instead on the straw wrapper he’s been fiddling with. 

“He locked me in the trunk of his car once to teach me how to escape. That’s how I knew to kick out the taillight when I was kidnapped that time. He would blindfold me so that I learned to use my other senses. He would take me and Gus out and leave us in the woods to learn how to survive and find our way back to civilization” Shawn shakes his head “It’s amazing to me that Gus didn’t run at the first sign of just how fucked up our particular father-son dynamic was."

“Christ Spencer, if I were on a domestic call and found out a parent was treating a kid like that, I would have that kid out of the house so fast –”

Now Shawn does look at him. “I know Henry loved me. I was never in any danger. He just had some weird ideas about parenting. He wanted me to grow up and be an even better version of himself. I think he dreamed of like, being able to introduce me as his son the FBI agent, or the police chief or something. He should have had you for a son, Lassie. You would have made him proud.”

“Shawn, I know he was proud of you. He gave you cases –"

“He knew I was a good detective. An effective tool for the department. It’s not the same as being proud of me” Shawn looks away “This is a depressing conversation, Lassie. Let’s talk about something else. Hey, are you ever going to tell me what happened with Marlowe?”

“This is your attempt at a less depressing conversation?”

“What can I say? I’m curious. She was hot, Lassie, and fresh out of prison. An impressive amount of porn starts off with that very premise.”

Lassiter scowls at him. “Don’t talk about her that way. It just didn’t work out. Not many people are cut out to be married to cops, and she turned out not to be one of them. That’s all.”

“No,” Shawn says, studying him with that perceptive gaze that makes Lassiter feel like he’s under a microscope, and which he also absurdly thinks is insanely sexy, “that’s not all. I can tell when you’re lying. But it’s okay to say that it’s none of my business.”

“Well then, it’s none of your fucking business.”

Shawn grins like he’s just been handed a compliment. “See? That wasn’t so hard. You want some dessert? I saw this chocolate lava cake on the menu that looked like a volcano of deliciousness.”

While Shawn flags down the waitress and orders his cake, Lassiter thinks about how he had failed with Marlowe, how he had built her up as an ideal in his head and was frustrated when she turned out to be a flesh-and-blood woman with her own idiosyncrasies, one of which just happened to be an inability to deal with all of his idiosyncrasies. Apparently, not everyone wants guns hidden all over the house, or Most Wanted posters tacked up in the dining room. And her affection for squirrels was just plain puzzling.

At least with Spencer he already knows everything annoying and frustrating about him, has, in fact, been building a tolerance towards his quirks for the last six years now, to the point where it’s no longer tolerance but affection. Realizing that makes it sting all the more to remember that this relationship is running on borrowed time. 

Shawn is eating his cake, but still watching him carefully. After a minute he sets his fork down and says “Let’s get out of here.”

“Is the cake not any good?”

“It’s a taste sensation, Lassie. But I’m in the mood for something else now.”

They barely make it to the car before Shawn is all over him, sucking his tongue into his mouth, mussing up his hair, pulling his shirt free from his pants so that he can dig his fingers into bare skin. They’re making out in the front seat of the car like horny adolescents, except Lassiter can’t remember doing anything like this when he had been a teenager. He slides a hand up under Shawn’s shirt to stroke his hand up to his chest, where he pinches a nipple. Shawn groans into his mouth. 

They’re interrupted by a passerby shouting “Get a room!”

Lassiter pulls away reluctantly, reminds himself that they’re sitting in a restaurant parking lot. “Maybe we should, um, get a room.”

Shawn smiles wickedly “Or we could just give everyone who walks by a good show. I’m up for it. What about you?” he punctuates the question by petting his hand over the thin material of Lassiter’s slacks covering his erection. “Oooh, feels like you’re up for it too.”

“Spencer…” Lassiter growls in warning. Or in arousal. It’s hard to tell at the moment. 

“Fine,” Shawn sighs, removing his hand, which makes Lassiter feel equal parts relieved and disappointed. “But we’re checking into the first hotel we see, got it?”

“Agreed.”

Lassiter wakes up the next morning in a tangle of scratchy sheets. The first hotel they had come to had been kind of a dump, but that hadn’t seemed to matter so much last night when Shawn’s hand had been on his thigh. For a brief time, his mouth had been attached to Lassiter’s neck as well, but Lassiter refused to drive anywhere until after Shawn had his seatbelt on, so Shawn had retaliated by naming in graphic detail all the things he was going to do to Lassiter once they were behind closed doors. Lassiter can actually feel himself starting to blush a little now as he recalls Shawn’s low voice uttering filthy sweet nothings coming from the passenger seat of the car while his hand stayed firmly glued to Lassiter’s leg.

“Dude! I want to know what you’re thinking about. Your ears are all pink.”

Shawn’s voice now is raspy with sleep, and as he contemplates the stained ceiling of their hotel room, Lassiter muses that he never dreamed he might sleep with someone who called him “dude” in bed. 

“I’m thinking that if I get bedbugs from this crappy hotel, it’s going to be your fault.”

Shawn looks at him critically. “You need to work on your pillow talk, Lassie. What I think you meant to say was that I am so amazingly, stupendously sexy that you can’t keep your hands off of me and just thinking about all the dirty, dirty things we do together makes you blush and you can’t believe you kept away from me for all those years.” He grins over at Lassiter “Feel free to say that now, to make up for the bedbug thing.”

“I can’t possibly remember all that to repeat it back to you, Spencer.” Lassiter says. “Maybe you should write it down.”

“Maybe later,” Shawn says, slumping back onto his pillow. After a pause, he says “I think it looks like a bunny rabbit.”

Lassiter looks at him in confusion. “What? What are you talking about?”

Shawn points up “The lovely water stain artwork on our ceiling that had you so entranced a few minutes ago. See, there are the ears, and those cracks are the whiskers, and if you squint just right you can see the cute little cottontail.”

Lassiter looks at the stain again; it does kind of look like a rabbit if he tilts his head a little. He considers it for a moment, trying to think of how to bring up the subject he really wants to talk about. 

He hesitates, then asks “Aren’t you bored?”

“With what? This?” Shawn asks disbelievingly, waving his hand in a gesture that encompasses himself, Lassiter, and the bed they’re in. “We’ve only been doing this for two days. It’s a little early for the seven year itch to set in.” Now he looks worried. “Why? Are you bored? I thought I was bringing my A game, but I can try harder if…” 

“No!” Lassiter say hastily “Not with this. This is…if you upped your game any, I might actually have a heart attack. I meant, aren’t you bored with bartending. Waiting tables. Whatever else you’ve been doing for money. Don’t you miss putting criminals behind bars?”

Shawn throws an arm over his eyes like he’s trying to hide from this conversation. “Oh, that,” he says flatly. “I like meeting new people, doing new things. It keeps my mind busy.”

“What, and solving crimes didn’t? I know you have to miss it. Guster told me that he does. He’s bored with his regular job.”

Shawn sighs. “Okay, yeah, I miss it. I’m good at it, it was exciting, whatever. I can’t go back to running Psych though, and I am in no way qualified to get a legitimate PI license.”

Lassiter wants to argue that Spencer could re-open Psych, even as he knows that would mean he himself would be abetting in defrauding the SBPD, which leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Still, when he weighs the idea of lying against Spencer’s phenomenal case-solving abilities, it’s tempting.

“Vick could hire you on as a consultant in a non-psychic capacity. We could say you got hit on the head and lost your abilities.”

“And when the higher-ups come around asking why I’m still getting paid if I’m not psychic anymore? What then?”

Lassiter sighs. There’s a way around this, he knows there has to be. Chief Vick can be ruthless when it comes to working the system, and if she were presented with the idea of Spencer coming back to work for her in some capacity, he knows she could figure out a way to do it. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. “We would think of something. I always thought I would rather cut out my tongue than admit this, but you’re an amazing detective. You shouldn’t let that go to waste.”

“Awww, Lassie that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. Well, aside from the time you were drunk and told me I was astounding.”

“I never said that.”

“Would I lie to you? Wait, don’t answer that.”

Lassiter rolls his eyes and tries to persevere with the conversation. “You should at least consider coming back to Santa Barbara, whether you re-open Psych or not. Guster is lonesome. He looks like half a person walking around without you. It’s depressing.”

Shawn sits up “Oh, Gussy will be fine. He’s a big boy. He survived college without me, and I traveled around for years after that before going home. Hey, if you want to go to that artillery demonstration, we should get dressed.”

Before Lassiter can say anything else, Shawn has disappeared into the bathroom. That didn’t go at all the way he had wanted it to. Spencer was supposed to jump at the chance to have his most ardent critic onboard the Psych bandwagon, or, failing that, he should have been swayed by the comment about Gus’s loneliness. Instead, he had dismissed everything Lassiter had said and left the room to escape the conversation. 

He punches a pillow in frustration. He has no idea how to approach this with Shawn, isn’t even entirely certain what his own motives are. He’s only sure about two things: He has to go back to Santa Barbara next week, and he doesn’t want this thing with Shawn to end. He had hoped appealing to two of Shawn’s favorite things – crime solving and Guster – would make him want to contemplate returning home, but evidently that was not a topic Shawn was willing to explore. 

Well. He would just have to think of another approach.


	11. Chapter 11

When they get to Lookout Mountain National Park for the Civil War era artillery demonstration, Shawn nimbly picks Lassiter’s pocket and holds up his phone in triumph.

“Ha, you didn’t even feel me taking it! I have the fingers of a master thief! Maybe that should be my next career. I wonder if Despereaux needs a partner?”

Lassiter’s forehead furrows in confusion. “Despereaux is dead. And for the record, I did feel that because you groped my ass while you were picking my pocket.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. I totally forgot how Despereaux blew up that time. Way to be a downer, Lassie! It’s a good thing you have such a nice ass. Anyway, do you mind if I borrow this to call Gus while you watch your manly, old-fashioned gun show? 

“Go ahead,” Lassiter says, secretly pleased that Shawn wants to call Guster again. Maybe it’s a sign that he’s homesick, maybe Gus will say something that convinces Shawn to come home.

“Awesome! As his best friend, it’s my job to tell him about all the crazy hot action I’ve been getting this week.”

“Oh god, please don’t,” Lassiter groans, but Shawn is already walking away to find a spot away from the crowds so he can talk.

It’s good though, even if it does mean imminent embarrassment for him, to see Shawn wanting to reconnect with Gus. Lassiter doesn’t fool himself into thinking that whatever this is that he has with Spencer could ever be as strong a pull as the bond Shawn has with Gus; the two of them are like Lucy and Ethel, Fred and Barney, Abbot and Costello, Robert E. Lee and his horse, Traveller. An inseparable pair. If anything will convince Shawn to go back to Santa Barbara, it’s going to be the fact that he can’t stand to be separated from Gus for any longer.

There have been other good signs regarding Shawn’s mental health over the last two days; he’s been eating, and he hasn’t had a drink since the first day Lassiter came to town. Actually, now that he thinks about it, Lassiter realizes he hasn’t been drinking since he came to Atlanta either. He’s sure his liver appreciates the break. They’ve apparently replaced the distraction of alcohol with the distraction of sex. It has to be healthier, Lassiter figures, and it’s certainly more fun.

After the artillery demonstration, which Lassiter finds he can barely pay attention to because he keeps getting distracted by thoughts of Shawn, he wanders around looking for Spencer, finally finding him in the gift shop. He’s still on the phone with Guster and doesn’t see Lassiter at first.

“Don’t be the 2008 remake of _Knight Rider_ , Gus! I’m not done exploring the awesomeness that is our great country yet. I know, on your vacation we should meet up in Vegas. We’ll rock and roll all night, and party all day,” he pauses, then says “Absolutely not, Burton Guster. We are not going to see Celine Dion. I’m the one sleeping with another dude, and even I think that’s too gay. Hey, speaking of which, Lassie’s here, so his gun show must be over. What? Gus, I can’t believe you would ask such a thing! To answer your question, no, Lassie’s abnormal interest in guns does not reflect on his manhood at all, I can assure you. He’s packing heat even without the weaponry, if you know what I mean.”

“Spencer!” Lassiter yelps, embarrassed. At the same time he hears Guster shriek “Shawn, I did not ask that! Tell Lassiter that I do not think about his…his…!” Words apparently fail him. Meanwhile, a woman standing nearby in the aisle of the gift shop is eyeing Lassiter up and down speculatively. 

“I think I gotta go now, Gus. Lassie’s turned a super interesting shade of red, so I have to make sure he’s not having a stroke or something. You know how old he is, I can’t be too careful. I’ll call you later, okay buddy?”

“I’m only a few years older than you,” Lassiter fumes as Shawn hangs up “and stop trying to embarrass me!”

“What was embarrassing about that? You should be proud! A lot of guys would kill to be, ah, as physically gifted as you are. And stamina! You’re like the Energizer Bunny, only instead of the little drum, you have – ”

“Okay,” Lassiter says, grabbing Shawn’s arm “We’re leaving now.”

“But I was gonna buy Gus one of those little Confederate flags!”

“He can thank me later for sparing him that,” Lassiter says, dragging Shawn out of the gift shop and towards the parking lot. Once they’re at the car, Shawn grins up at him.

“That was fun! You can manhandle me some more, if you want.”

“Maybe later,” Lassiter grunts. He wants to be sharing in Shawn’s upbeat mood, but he’s too upset over the conversation he overheard. Not the part about his physical attributes (to be honest, he’s equal parts mortified and flattered over Shawn’s effusions), but what he had said to Guster about not being done traveling around the country. About meeting him later in Vegas. From the sound of it, Gus had tried to talk him into coming back to Santa Barbara, and Shawn had flatly refused. 

“Are we leaving already? Don’t you want to look around some more?”

“No,” Lassiter says shortly. “I think I’m done here.”

Shawn looks puzzled, but shrugs in acceptance “Okay. Where to next?”

“I don’t know yet,” Lassiter replies. As they get into the car it occurs to him that what just happened in the gift shop was a deliberate distraction. Spencer knew he had overheard the end of the conversation with Gus, and was being outrageous in an attempt to get Lassiter to forget it. Well, screw that.

“Good conversation with Guster?”

“Uh huh. He says if I ever attempt to scar him for life by telling him what we do together again, he’s suing you for mental distress.”

“Why me?” Lassiter asks, outraged. “Why not you?”

“Dude, Gus knows I don’t have any money. You may only make a civil servants salary, but it’s still more than I make.”

Lassiter is tempted to argue the point, but reminds himself not to get distracted. “Guster misses you. Why don’t you come back to Santa Barbara?”

Okay, points off for making it all about Gus, but he can’t make himself any more vulnerable than he already is. He feels exposed, like he’s laying all of his feelings bare, when he’s hardly even had the chance to figure out what his feelings even are, just by asking the question.

“Lassiepants, I haven’t finished my fifty state tour of local restaurants with the word ‘shack’ in the title. Gus understands how important my goals are to me.”

That’s it. There’s a rest stop coming up ahead of them on the highway, and it’s a good thing because Lassiter feels like he’s going to explode. He pulls into the rest stop driveway, then drives around to the back. Thankfully, the place looks deserted. After parking, Lassiter gets out of the car and slams the door, pacing away to try and get some semblance of calm back.

“Lassiter, are you okay? What’s wrong man?” Shawn is right behind him, too close. Lassiter swings around to confront him.

“What is this to you, Shawn? Is it just a diversion?”

Shawn actually stumbles back a step, his eyes wide with shock.

“Jesus. Fucking. Christ. How can you ask me that?”

Oh, Lassiter thinks in some distant part of his mind. I’ve finally succeeded in making Spencer angry. Good job. 

“I’m sorry Spencer, I don’t know what to think! You avoid saying anything about going back to Santa Barbara, when you know that I have to go back, and I just have to wonder if this is just a fling to you, or…or some sort of sick challenge, ‘seduce the Head Detective’.”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Lassiter regrets them, because he knows it’s not true, but it’s too late now, and Shawn is practically spitting with rage.

“Years, Lassiter. I waited for you to get your head out of your ass and get over your stupid repression or whatever it was for fucking YEARS. I don’t know how I could have been more obvious, short of ripping your clothes off.”

“Funny, to me it looked less like you were waiting for something and more like you were making time with O’Hara.”

“Don’t you dare drag Jules into this. There are a lot of reasons I should never have become involved with her, but none of them have anything to do with you. Was I supposed to wait around for you for fucking ever? And now you’re the one who appears out of nowhere finally ready to give in to this THING” Shawn gestures helplessly between them “as long as we’re thousands of miles away from everyone who knows us. You think this is just a fling for me? How do I know it’s not just some sort of midlife crisis bullshit for you?”

“Is that what you think? I came across the fucking country for you!”

“Yeah, you did. What does that mean, though? Do you want me to come back to Santa Barbara so we can shack up together? You ready to be the gay poster boy for the SBPD? And gosh, won’t it be a fun conversation when you tell Jules that you’re screwing her ex? I’m doing you a favor by not going back, and you fucking know it.”

Lassiter hates him a little bit, because he knows Shawn is right. He can’t imagine going home with Shawn as his boyfriend (such a stupid word, when neither of them are boys, no matter how much Spencer might like to flaunt his immaturity), what it would mean for his career, for his life. What if he took the chance and turned his life upside down for Spencer only to have this relationship crash and burn after a month. Odds are, it will. They’re both strong-willed and stubborn, and in many ways they have fundamentally different worldviews. Lassiter, for example, is always going to belief that honesty is the best policy, while for Shawn the truth is something to be bent and twisted for his amusement.

And even knowing that, the thought of this ending makes him want to smash his fist into something repeatedly.

Shawn’s anger seems to deflate when Lassiter doesn’t refute his argument. He sags against the car and rubs a hand across his face. “You know I’m right, Lassie. It doesn’t matter what I want. We’ll just make a clean break of it and you can go home and pretend this never happened.”

No. Just, fucking no. Lassiter is not ready to give this up so easily, and a hot pool of rage spills out into his chest at the idea that Shawn is doing just that. Without realizing it, he’s moved close enough so that they’re standing practically nose to nose and he pushes Shawn against the car, then reaches out to cup Shawn’s jaw and pull him into a bruising kiss, moving his mouth down to his neck and sucking hard on the tender skin there. Some primal part of his brain wants to mark Shawn, provide tangible proof to the world of what they’re doing so that no one can pretend that this never happened. 

Shawn is clutching at his shirtfront with desperate fingers and babbling “Fuck yeah, Lassie. I knew we’d get around to the angry sex sooner or later.”

Lassiter pulls away long enough to growl “Shut up."

“Yes sir, Head Detective sir.” Shawn’s words are light, but his voice is heavy with lust, and he’s grinding against Lassiter aggressively enough to suggest that Lassiter’s not the only one who has a point to make. 

Lassiter reaches down and jerks open Shawn’s jeans, pushes aside denim and boxers so that he can wrap a hand around Shawn’s dick. Shawn grabs his forearms so hard that Lassiter knows he’s going to leave bruises and snarls “That’s right, Lassie, do me right here against the car. You remember that first case when you had me up against a car? How many times have you gotten off imagining something like this?”

Lassiter kisses him again to shut him up, a messy kiss full of tongue and teeth. Shawn bites at his lips and Lassiter loves it. He breaks from the kiss just long enough to lick his palm so that he can slick his hand up and down Shawn’s cock, then slides his mouth against Shawn’s again until Shawn is forced to pull away from the kiss as his breathing becomes more and more unsteady.

“Damn you, Lassie. I never…never…” he trails off, burying his face in Lassiter’s shoulder and biting down hard as he comes.

Lassiter can feel the last of his anger draining out of him as he hesitantly reaches up to stroke a hand soothingly down Shawn’s back. How is it that he can go so fast from wanting to kill him to wanting to take care of him? Shawn’s grip on his arms has loosened, and as if sensing his mood now, he tilts his head up and kisses Lassiter, slow and sweet, while at the same time reversing their positions so that Lassiter is the one against the car.

“We’re not done here, Lassie” he whispers into Lassiter’s ear, then drops to his knees so quickly that it makes Lassiter’s head spin. Or maybe that’s from Shawn unzipping his pants, pulling him out and licking him like he’s a lollipop. 

“Don’t tease,” Lassiter groans, and for once, Shawn obeys him, getting down to business. He’s already so close to the edge that it doesn’t take long, coming so hard that he could swear he sees stars. Afterwards, he sinks to the ground beside Shawn, both of them leaning against the car. 

“Are we done fighting?” Shawn asks, resting his head against Lassiter’s shoulder.

“For now, at least.” Lassiter puts his arm around Shawn’s shoulder; his post-orgasmic bliss seems to carry the embarrassing side effect of making him want to nuzzle into Shawn. “Even though we didn’t solve anything.”

“Are you kidding? We solved the mystery of how do I get Lassie to break California Penal Code 647 (a).”

“The California public indecency law doesn’t apply here in Georgia,” Lassiter points out.

“I haven’t memorized the Georgia Penal Code, but I’m sure they have a similar law. It’s probably even worse here, you know, their penal code is probably not kind to two guys going at it in a public place.”

“Stop saying penal.”

Shawn snorts out a laugh “Is it getting you all hot and bothered?”

Lassiter flicks his ear. “You get me all hot and bothered,” he admits. 

“Yeah, you owe me a new pair of jeans, by the way. I think you broke my zipper.”

“Oops. Sorry.”

“Never apologize for wanting to get into my pants,” Shawn says sincerely.

“So now what?”

“I don’t know about you, but I really want to get cleaned up. Can we find a decent hotel, please?”

Lassiter looks over at Shawn, at his tousled hair and swollen mouth and busted jeans and the shockingly dark hickey at his neck. He reaches over and brushes his thumb against the spot, hastily pulling his hand away when Shawn flinches slightly.

“I’m s-”

“Don’t you dare apologize for that, either,” Shawn says sharply. “I plan on admiring it in the mirror for hours later.”

Lassiter feels tension in his chest that he didn’t even know he was holding onto ease.

“Narcissist.”

“That was the official diagnosis, yes.”

“Okay,” Lassiter says, heaving himself to his feet and offering Shawn a hand to pull him off the ground, “hotel, shower, food. Am I missing anything?”

“Before you go checking us into a hotel, you might want to clean yourself up a little,” Shawn suggests with a grin. “You look a lot like a guy who just had mind-blowing sex up against a car.”

Lassiter goes into the rest stop bathroom to wash his hands and straighten his clothes, and catching sight of himself in the mirror realizes that Shawn is right; he looks, for lack of a better word, ravished. His cheeks are pink from scraping up against Shawn’s stubble when they were kissing, and his shirt is mysteriously missing a few buttons. Almost hesitantly he tugs his shirt away from his shoulder so that he can see the spot where Shawn bit him, and finds that Shawn has marked him as surely as he marked Shawn. He stares at the bite for a minute, a weird mixture of satisfaction and affection swirling around in his gut, then goes back out to the car, and to Shawn.


	12. Chapter 12

After they’re checked into a decent hotel, Lassiter braving the check-in desk despite the fact that he knows he looks completely disreputable, Shawn drags him into the shower. 

“Why waste water? And then afterwards, maybe a post-sex sex nap.”

“Post-sex sex?”

“Well, yeah. Obviously we’re gonna do it again in the shower. Who passes up shower sex?”

Lassiter can hardly argue with that kind of logic. 

Later, they’re both stretched out on the bed, Spencer in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt with a pineapple wearing sunglasses on it and Lassiter in his pajama pants and an SBPD t-shirt. Shawn had gone across the street and gotten them hamburgers from a fast food place, and now they’re watching _Paths to Love_ at Shawn’s insistence. It all feels ridiculously domestic and way too good.

“Have you considered not going back?”

Lassiter is startled by the question, because, well, no, of course he hasn’t thought about that. He has responsibilities in Santa Barbara, and he reaches for the remote to mute the TV before saying as much.

“I have a career there! And also a mortgage.”

“I know,” Shawn says, sounding a bit sad, “but there are other police stations, Lassie. Face it, you’re never going to make chief as long as Vick is there. You might have a better shot somewhere else.”

“I don’t even know if that’s what I want anymore,” Lassiter admits. “Karen spends so much time pushing paper at her desk. I think I might hate that.”

“Still,” Shawn persists “there are plenty of police departments out there that would be happy to have you. With your case solve rate? They would totally overlook all the personality issues.” Shawn says this with a wink and a grin, and while Lassiter feels like he should be offended, he chooses to ignore it, mostly because he has a sneaking suspicion that Spencer is right.

“And as for the mortgage,” Shawn continues “does the family next door to you still want to expand? You know they have to want more room for that creepy demon kid of theirs. You could sell.”

Spencer is right. There’s nothing really tying him to Santa Barbara. At the same time, he does have a job and a home there, and he isn’t sure he wants to give any of that up.

Lassiter reaches over and lays his hand on top of Shawn’s, needing to establish some sort of connection before he attempts to dive into this topic.

“Shawn, why are you so reluctant to go back?”

Shawn bites his lip, looks everywhere but at Lassiter, and for a moment Lassiter is sure he’s not going to answer, that he’s going to brush off the question with a joke, so he’s surprised when Shawn replies.

“I’m scared to go back.”

“Scared of what?”

“Lassie, I can’t shake the memory of what happened to my dad. I still have nightmares more nights than not. How much worse is that going to be back home, where everywhere I go will be a place I remember being with him? If I go home, I’ll have to deal with his house and all his things, and all those memories that are sitting in the back of my brain waiting to be triggered. I don’t think I can do it.”

“Have you considered that maybe what you have to do is confront all those memories before you can move on?” Lassiter winces because he thinks he probably sounds like the therapist he occasionally visits at her most pedantic, and Spencer is bound to make fun of him for it, but Shawn only offers up a wan half smile.

“That sounds like a very responsible, grown-up thing to do, but as we’ve established in the past, I suck at being a grown-up.”

“You wouldn’t have to do it alone, Shawn. Guster would be there.” Lassiter hates himself even as the words come out of his mouth. Man up, Detective, he thinks in disgust “Me too. I mean, I would be there too if you wanted me to be.”

Shawn turns his hand palm up so that his fingers are laced with Lassiter’s and squeezes hard, then pulls away and folds his arms across his chest. 

“Oh, we’re just scratching the surface of things I’m afraid of. I’m also scared of going back and running into Jules. Why should she be forced to see me again? It’s a lot easier for her if I stay away.”

Lassiter wants to be exasperated by this, since Spencer brought this particular situation on himself, but there’s no denying the fact that with this newfound dimension to his own relationship with Shawn that the Juliet thing is awkward.

“Look, I don’t think it would be as bad as you’re thinking. Yeah, O’Hara was pissed and hurt, and she had good reason to be, but it was months and months ago, Shawn. She has a new career and a new life now. The last time I talked to her she told me she was worried about you. She’s moved on. So,” he says sternly, “don’t use her as an excuse.”

“There’s also Gus. Not that I’m afraid of Gus!” he adds hastily, “I could totally take him in a fight and don’t let him tell you any differently, Lassie. That time in eleventh grade was just a fluke. But I don’t…I’ve been such an asshole. It wasn’t just me who lost Psych, it was him too. Screwing up my life is, you know, my right, but I also screwed up his. Gus is too good of a person to ever hate me for any of that, but he probably should.”

“Guster misses the hell out of you. He’s lonely. And if he were here right now, he would tell you not to patronize him, that he knew what he was doing when he chose to be a part of Psych.”

“Well,” Shawn says, and he’s smiling slightly but his voice is tight “you have an answer for everything.”

Lassiter sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I know it’s not all as easy as I’m making it sound. I just want you to know that it’s not impossible, and that I’ll, you know, help if you want me to.” Damn it, why is he so terrible at saying anything meaningful?

“I’m still so angry,” Shawn says softly, and Lassiter turns to look at him more closely. His hands are clenched so hard that his knuckles are white. “I don’t want to scare Gus by letting him see that side of me. I mean, he’s seen me lose my temper before, obviously, but not this kind of long-term…” he trails off and turns to meet Lassiter’s gaze.

“I’m still pissed at him.” For a moment, Lassiter is confused, because why would Shawn be angry at Gus? But then he realizes that he’s talking about Henry. “I don’t like being so mad all the time. It messes with my mojo. How could he not have known? I grew up thinking he had to be the most amazing cop in the world, but he couldn’t even tell that the guys working with him were a bunch of crooks. Maybe he deserved to get shot.”

Lassiter stares at him, shocked “How can you say that?”

“Why shouldn’t I? His own partner, his best friends on the force. How could he not know that they were dirty?”

“He trusted them, Shawn. Cops have to trust each other, or someone will get killed. You know that.”

Shawn laughs bitterly “Yeah, and look how that turned out. He trusted them and someone did get killed. Him.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Lassiter admits. “I don’t know that I could ever suspect my partner of anything like that either.”

“Yeah, but your partner was _Jules_. Of course she would never do anything like that.”

“Exactly. Didn’t you call your dad’s partner Uncle Lou? He was like family to you and Henry. How could Henry ever have suspected him of covering up a murder? Accepting a bribe?”

Shawn sighs and rubs his hand over his eyes. “I know that. I do. But Henry was the one who taught me to be suspicious of everyone, that most people are capable of bad things if they’re pushed hard enough, and he’s the one who taught me to be observant about other people’s behavior. There had to have been signs, but he missed them. He would have told me that I needed to take emotion out of the equation and look at the facts, but he couldn’t do that himself.”

“So Henry wasn’t perfect,” Lassiter says softly “big surprise. You have to forgive him for that. He was still a good cop, and a good friend, even if his trust was misplaced.” He hesitates, then adds, “And while you’re at it, forgive yourself too. You couldn’t have known, Shawn.”

“I should have known!” Shawn snaps, his voice choked with anger. “What good is my so-called fucking gift if I couldn’t even use it to save my dad?”

“You didn’t have all the facts! How could you have known? You’re not actually psychic, Spencer, remember?”

“Thanks Lassie, that’s really helpful.”

Lassiter takes a deep breath, letting Shawn’s sarcasm roll off of him, but even as he does, Shawn is standing up and pulling on a pair of jeans. 

“I think I’m going to go for a walk.”

“Shawn-”

Spencer holds up a hand to stop him from talking. “We’re cool, Lassie. I just need some fresh air and some ‘me’ time, okay?”

“All right,” Lassiter says carefully, watching as Shawn puts on his shoes. “Don’t forget to take a key.” Jesus, could he be more useless? He has no idea how to help Shawn through any of this, and now he’s probably making it all even worse by saying things that are stupid and obvious. 

But Shawn just flashes a quick smile and holds up a hotel key card. “Got it. I’ll be back later, ‘kay? Don’t wait up for me.”

And then he’s gone. 

After Shawn leaves, Lassiter numbly picks up the remote control and unmutes the television. _Paths of Love_ is still on, with some young idiot pledging his eternal devotion to the blandly pretty girl sitting next to him.

“I knew from the first moment I saw you, when fate brought you to my cash register and you ordered the grilled chicken sandwich, no mayo, extra pickles, that it was love at first sight. When I handed you your Diet Coke and our fingers touched, I knew we would be together forever!”

Lassiter snorts in disgust at the TV. “Stalker,” he mutters under his breath, while at the same time there’s a clip of the girl sitting alone saying “I admit, when Jeremy said all that stuff about the chicken sandwich and the Diet Coke I thought it was kind of creepy, but it is sweet that he remembered my order. The idea of love at first sight is so romantic!”

What a bunch of crap. The closest thing he’s ever experienced to love at first sight was what he had with Marlowe, and even that was probably closer to lust at first sight and a lot of wishful thinking. In the end that connection had proven to be far more fleeting than he had hoped, the relationship unable to stand up to reality. 

With Victoria, while it wasn’t love at first sight, there had certainly been a strong mutual attraction: the poor little rich girl who wanted to be rescued from her overbearing father and the young cop who saw himself as her knight in shining armor. There was certainly a lot more to their relationship than that, and they had shared some good years together before it all went to hell, but there was no fairy tale ending to keep them together happily ever after. 

And now there’s Shawn, and whatever they have together, it definitely hadn’t started with love at first sight. More like violent dislike at first sight, followed by years of grudging acceptance. Only that had changed a long time ago, hadn’t it? Lassiter wasn’t sure when the grudging acceptance had given way to a certain amount of admiration, even fondness, and yes, a healthy dose of sexual attraction, hidden beneath layers of macho bullshit and self-preservation.

Because he always knew that if he ever really let himself give in to just how much he liked Spencer, then…well, then he would be in the situation he was in now, where he feels like Shawn has the power to crush him with a word. Is this love? It feels more like some sort of torture dreamed up by his enemies. Back in Santa Barbara, before Henry died, before Shawn left, it had been easy to keep all of these feelings carefully repressed. It wasn’t as if he was the most self-reflective guy on earth, after all, and he had always been so busy with work. It’s a lot harder to ignore all of these obnoxious feelings here so far from home, with nothing to focus on but Shawn. Harder also to ignore the feeling that nothing he does is going to have any meaning if he doesn’t have Shawn in his life.

Goddamnit, he’s in love.

Somehow, Shawn Spencer had slipped through the bars of the steel cage that Lassiter imagined around his heart.

Shawn might not even come back, he realizes with something like terror. He could have already charmed someone into giving him a job in one of the tourist trap restaurants littering the area, or even worse, gotten a ride out of town from a friendly stranger. Stop it, he thinks to himself. If he can’t trust Spencer to come back when he says he will, then this whole thing is definitely doomed.

It’s a little more than three hours later when Shawn returns. Lassiter has been lying in bed with the TV on, though he can’t remember anything he watched. When he hears the door opening, he closes his eyes to feign sleep, because he doesn’t want Shawn to think he was waiting for him or anything (well, and he also reaches over to the nightstand to put his hand on his Derringer, just in case it’s not Shawn at the door. You can never be too careful). 

He can hear Spencer kick off his shoes, shuck his jeans, turn off the television, and finally climb into bed next to him. Lassiter is on his side with his back to Shawn, and Shawn spoons up behind him, wrapping an arm around him and splaying a hand across his chest. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he whispers against Lassiter’s neck, and Lassiter shivers from the sensation of Shawn’s lips just barely grazing his skin. “I don’t know if I can face going home yet. But I’m crazy about you, Lassie. I have been practically since the day we met. Like, I’m Lloyd Dobler and you’re Diane Court kind of crazy about you.”

Lassiter huffs out a breath in exasperation, trying to hide the fact that his heart feels like it might burst out of his chest. “I don’t know who those people are, Spencer.”

He can feel Shawn smile against his skin. “We have GOT to work on your movie education. First up, a John Cusack marathon. What I was trying to say – before I was so rudely interrupted – is that I’m not ready for this to be over in a week.”

“Me neither,” Lassiter says softly. 

“Good,” Shawn says, and Lassiter can tell that he’s still smiling. “I’ll figure something out. I’m better at making spontaneous decisions than long-term planning anyway.”


	13. Chapter 13

_Well, you have suffered enough_  
and warred with yourself  
It’s time that you won.  
\- Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova 

Lassiter wakes up to the sound of laughter. He rolls over to ask Spencer what in god’s name could be so funny at the crack of dawn only to realize as he does that Shawn is laughing in his sleep. 

“Gus, don’t be a…” he mumbles, then trails off into a giggle.

Lassiter watches him in bemusement. Terrifying, really, to think that Shawn’s brain is so disciplined that he can recall the most minute details, while also seeming to be the equivalent of an amusement park ride. 

“I’m trying to decide if you staring at me while I’m sleeping is creepy or sexy. Or both, like Cillian Murphy.”

Shawn’s eyes are still closed, but there’s a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and he reaches up unerringly to grab a fistful of Lassiter’s t-shirt and pull him down for a kiss.

“You were laughing in your sleep,” Lassiter explains after they part. “And having some sort of conversation with Guster.”

Shawn opens his eyes. “I dreamed that Gus and I were building the Great Wall of China with M&M’s but he kept trying to use the peanut ones and they don’t stack as well.”

“I…see,” Lassiter says, failing spectacularly to picture this scenario. 

Shawn pushes him onto his back and kisses his throat while sliding a hand under the waistband of Lassiter’s pajamas.

“What was the M&M motto? Oh yeah: they melt in your mouth, not in your hand.”

“Good motto,” Lassiter manages to breathe out before losing all coherent thought, as Shawn moves down to replace his hand with his mouth.

Later in the morning, while Shawn is taking a shower, Lassiter goes outside to make a phone call.

“Chief?”

“Detective Lassiter! You’re supposed to still be on vacation. I’m not letting you come back early, Carlton.”

“No, that’s not what I was calling to ask.”

“Oh! Well, how are you? Are you having fun? Is everything okay, Carlton?”

Lassiter doesn’t even know where to start with that barrage of questions, so he decides to just plunge in and get to the reason why he called in the first place.

“Chief, I was wondering if you would mind if I added one more week to my leave?”

There’s a long silence on the other end. Lassiter holds his breath. An extra week isn’t a long time, but maybe it will be enough to give him and Shawn both a chance to figure out what their next steps are going to be.

“Of course you can take an extra week if you need it, but…Carlton? What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

Lassiter paces the hotel parking lot nervously as he thinks about how much he wants to give away here. After a pause, he says “I’m with Spencer. Shawn. He’s been having a hard time, you know, with what happened to Henry.”

There’s another nerve-wracking silence as Chief Vick absorbs this. “And you think you’re the best person to help him with that?” she finally asks.

“No,” he admits “but I’m the one who’s here. And,” he adds in his own defense, “he seems to be doing much better now than he was when I found him.”

“Could I speak with him for a minute?”

“He’s taking a shower right now,” Lassiter says, then shuts up in a hurry when it occurs to him that he might have just said too much. The pause from Chief Vick’s end feels more loaded this time, and he can feel the tips of his ears turning pink.

“I see. Well then, carry on Detective. Please tell Mr. Spencer that we here at the SBPD all miss him. And Carlton? Please be careful. For your sake and for Shawn’s.”

“Thank you Karen,” he says awkwardly. “I’ll be in touch in a couple of weeks.”

After he hangs up he paces for a few more minutes, wondering how much Vick had deduced from that conversation. She hadn’t made Chief by being a poor detective, after all. He also has to wonder if it even matters. If Shawn comes back to Santa Barbara like Lassiter wants him to, then Vick – and everyone else, for that matter – is going to know what’s going on between them soon enough. 

After he feels marginally calmer, he goes back into the hotel room. Shawn is sitting cross-legged on the bed, a pensive expression on his face as he plays with a Swiss Army knife that Lassiter recognizes from fishing trips with the elder Spencer as belonging to Henry. Upon seeing Lassiter, he stands up and puts the knife in his pocket. 

“I don’t know about you, Lassie, but I’m starving! Let’s go find some breakfast somewhere.” 

He follows Lassiter out to the car, the travel book of Civil War sites of Georgia in his hand. “Where are we going today?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t planned out an itinerary for the rest of the week.”

Shawn grins. “Cool! We’ll just make it up as we go along.”

Lassiter looks over at him, leaning back in the passenger seat of the car with his sunglasses on, a relaxed smile on his face. This is not going to be easy, he knows. If Shawn comes home, they’ll start to get on each other’s nerves, will have to figure out a way to make this thing of theirs work outside of the protective bubble of this vacation. He’ll have to deal with whatever fallout comes at work from being in a relationship with another man, and frankly, he’s not sure he’s up for that. He’ll also have to handle the insanely awkward situation of telling O’Hara that he’s sleeping with her ex. Also, he’s not fooling himself that one night of good dreams means that Shawn is over his trauma; for him, going back to Santa Barbara will, at least to begin with, re-open the wound that was caused by Henry’s death. He knows that he loves Shawn, but he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough for everything coming towards them.

He must look grim, because Shawn reaches over and lays a hand on his cheek and leans in to kiss him. 

“Cheer up, Lassie! We’ll have pancakes, and then we’ll go wherever the road takes us. It’ll be fun!”

He grins irrepressibly, and Lassiter can’t help but smile back. Screw the future. Right now he has Shawn beside him and the open road in front of him. This is somewhere he never imagined he might be, and now he can’t imagine anything better. 

“Pancakes sound good,” he says, and starts the car.

END


End file.
